OpSci is the Open Science DAO, a web-native community of scientists, engineers, and activists building public goods to streamline research and innovation
Verse is a decentralized science society registry with the goal to onboard 1,000 open science researchers to web3 within 1 year after launch.
Science is merging with software. This is great for productivity and the efficiency of research systems but not for individual researchers or the knowledge-seeking public.
Knowledge is Power, and Power is for the People
Knowledge will be gated as long as we rely on centralized service providers and institutions. Digital science's (as a service) primary goal is to monetize human labor, scientific insight, and creativity into revenue streams for entrenched institutions.
The Current System is Broken
Currently, scientists conflate their identity and self-worth with that of the gate-keepers, keeping them locked into a outdated and ineffective system.
Self Sovereign Science is the Future
Our team believes that self-sovereignty through cryptography is the only way researchers can assert intellectual ownership of their digital works.
Cryptography is the way
Web3 technology is a path forward to self-sovereign researchers that own their intellectual output, are free to associate and collaborate on their own terms, and are not defined by out-dated status signaling such as ivy-league or R1 affiliation.
Researchers seeking to join a DeSci Society navigate to verse.opsci.io to create an account with their email address.
New users verify their credentials and import their academic activity from services such as ORCID, Figshare, or OSF.
Next, users create a digital identity. This can be completely public, or pseudonymous using ZK proofs to verify their credentials. Each verified digital identity is minted as a "hypercertificate" that tracks the impact of their research based on their imported activity.
Verified accounts can apply to join listed societies in the registry. Researchers aren't defined by their affiliation and are encouraged to be interdisciplinary to maximize their impact metrics.
Gitcoin donors, grant makers, and philanthropists can directly fund impactful researchers by donating to receive a fraction of their hypercertificate. Society membership also unlocks custom hypercertificates that users can mint by completing tasks, or challenges.
We've developed a novel software architecture with the Holonym team that allows a researcher to create a truly non-custodial web3 wallet using just an email address and interact with DeSci protocols without worrying about gas, crypto tokens, nonce's, or seed phrases.
We will release the alpha version of the application with a group of early testers selected from DeSci DAOs. We will test a pilot with the following features:
We plan to partner with 10 professional scientific societies to offer them the following services:
We will open up Verse for open registration; first for new societies that request to be listed, second for all users. This will coincide with the progressive decentralization of the project. Hypercertificate NFTs will be used for governance to decide on the future of the project such as:
Our team is an all-star cast of researchers with experience working in non-profits, open source engineering, and have been involved in the DeSci space since 2020.
Check out https://verse.opsci.io
You can also track our progress on our blogs: