Most of the world progresses with collaborations between people. So does academia. Researchers advance the knowledge of humanity by sharing their achievement with peers and developing more researches from the shared ones. A system of such activities is called Scholarly Communication, where journals and publishers work as the major media. Scholarly communication is specifically important in that it is a circulating system: a well shared knowledge gives much more potential for yet another knowledge.
Humanity has progressed a lot. Much of the world has achieved democracy, relieving from the central power of Monarchy and Aristocracy. Religions are separated from politics. Scientists further contributed to the improvement of society with outstanding technologies. The recent advancement of IT has pulled it up by enabling almost every piece of information and knowledge to nearly everybody. It is unfortunate for the mankind, not to mention the academics, that Scholarly Communication has gone the other way.
Though the invention of internet has made the traditional exclusively-available brick-and-mortar journals now accessible to anyone in the globe, researchers are still behind the walls. Commercial publishers are earning tremendous profits on the efforts of researchers, putting significant financial burdens and paywalls on the system. Journals, for-profit or not, are adding to the limitations with their closed, centralized structures and policies. Things worsen as most of the world, academic or not, evaluates the researchers and their outputs by irrational, outdated metrics: citation counts and impact factors.
Pluto, just as all the academics around the world would do, craves to solve these absurdities, by creating a fair, transparent, reasonable, and efficient communication platform for scholars, decentralized from the present too much power of publishers. Using blockchain technology, Pluto decentralizes the way academics share, evaluate, and reuse their research outputs. The scope of these outputs is extended beyond the present narrow definition confined to published papers to a broader sense of various information occurring mid- research. The values arising in the cycle of the system, both in financial and reputational terms, are credited rightfully to the ones who contribute to them. The reputational compensations, in the long-term, will work as an alternative metric for academics.
By creating a decentralized, transparent, and reasonable system of records for academic activities, Pluto makes the global scholarly communication efficient than ever. The whole cost savings will be greater than 80 billion USD throughout entire research industry. Besides being efficient, the paradigm of scholarly communication shifts with Pluto. As all kinds of mid-research outputs are empowered and promoted to be shared, the lifetime value of researches will be fully utilized, making the current global R&D of more than 2 trillion USD an obsolete number. Along with the practice of validating researches, the alternative, objective performance indicator for researches, and a new system for allocating resources, there will be extraordinary advances in current challenges like incurable diseases or sustainable energy. Ultimately, the decentralized academia initiated by Pluto will advance the way the knowledge of humanity itself advances.
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