In Science We Trust. In Crypto... We’ll See

🍏your Sunday read 16th February 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Hey Scholar👋

Our story this week is about the convergence of two things I bet you’d have never imagined: research and cryptocurrency. It’s a super interesting microcosm of the research community, who believe that funding science with crypto is not only possible, it will make science better.

It goes without saying that this piece is written from a purely academic standpoint and is not intended to promote cryptocurrency.

So grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

In Science We Trust. In Crypto… We’ll See.

Written by The Tatler

Even if you won’t admit to using Scihub, you have definitely heard of it. The (in)famous automatic paywall circumvention tool that could get you a copy of a paywalled journal article faster than you could say “institutional access” (at least before 2023, when a court order banned uploading new articles). Recently, Scihub had become so ubiquitous and so reliable that we forgot it wasn’t just a normal part of the Internet’s scholarly infrastructure, like PubMed, Scopus, or Google Scholar. And like other free services, we never asked where funding for its operation came from.

The question of how Scihub has managed to keep the doors to knowledge wide open without charging its users is fascinating:

the answer leads to a new, transparent, and democratic model that reimagines how we fund access to knowledge, maintain the scientific record, and support research.

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