I'm not a coder, an entrepreneur or really skilled in anything, I'm more of a dreamweaver, dependent on others to act out my ideas on my behalf.

These ideas come occasionally but this most recent one has been floating around in my mind for some weeks now, I felt it was time to put it down in tangible words.

Quick steemSTEM plug

Most reading know that I'm part of the SteemSTEM team but since it is the foundation of my upcoming idea, I should quickly introduce it. We are a manual curation team that promotes posts written about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects, but also venture into other areas if suitable such as humanities and sci-fi.

We have quite a few very real scientists with real published work out there, including at least two people who have worked at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, numerous Chemists, Engineers and Biologists, and they all see the value in this community we're building together.

So in short, we reward written work with STEEM, and in return, the authors provide free, public access to their written work. Capiche?

The problems

Why can't that be extended to the 'real world'?

There are numerous problems researchers and academics face in the brutal world of publication:

Funding

Funding can be a very limiting force that breeds dishonesty and manipulation of results and even the agenda on the whole. To get private funding, one needs to pander to the whims and desires of the company hiring you. To get funding from the government, well perhaps that's actually kind of the same these days, but with less money.

To get published in a journal, positive results get far more favour overr negative or neutral results, which encourages individuals to skew results or emphasize bias to reach this end goal.

I'm sure many scientists out there can address many more issues regarding funding, and though there are many nuances to this argument (such as how papers are often purchased much cheaper in bundles, and real-world prices, in some cases have actually dropped), the fact remains that the people and the public by and large can't or aren't willing to pay.

Accessibility

Similarly, access to papers is getting harder and harder to come by and prohibitively expensive. Some journaly ask for a monthly subscription fee that I've seen reach over $50, and others ask for upwards of $100 per paper.

This breeds creations such as sci-hub and torrents and other illegal innovations that swipe the funding right out of the researchers' hands. In their defense, for developing nations, accessing such journals can be nothing short of impossible with such huge price tags and they have but little choice but to turn to illegal measures.

For the casual readers, they cannot get funded access to these journals, alienating the realm of scientific inquiry from the mainstream audiences which surely breeds a culture of misinformation and conspiracy as only pop-sci and anti-sci viral-desperate journalists have access to them and can re-phrase them however they see fit for the world to see.

Readability

It's getting increasingly uncommon to see research that is even remotely readable to the common eye. Most are designed to be read by fellow researchers in the same field, those whose lives are dedicated to learning the complex terminology and numbers.

Even if all papers magically became free, who would even read them? YAWN. In fact, a team of Swedish researchers actually quantified this phenomenon.

As an article on nature self-depricatingly points out, it prides itself as a rather publicly accessible journal, with sentences such as:

Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.

Where does STEEM come in?

SteemSTEM alone has rewarded around $1,500,000 to blogs and articles according to the tag search on Steemit, and we are but a small community of manual curators.

To expand into the real world, one could create a new front end on the steem blockchain dedicated to freely accessible published papers, something that is much needed by a lot of people around the world.

Readability

Rather than just posting giant, complicated PDF documents onto the blockchain, I imagine an author could instead post the abstract alone, or even a personal blog on their current research or proposal.

This would work well to bridge that gap between the mainstream and academia, feeding on what is increasingly becoming an attention economy.

Accessibility

One could provide access to the journals which are held on a frontend (say, research.steem) in which the papers are only accessible by Steem account holders but otherwise paid for by concept of upvote donation.

The full papers need not be part of the blockchain, but the initial abstract would be like any other post on steemit or busy etc.

This would disincentivize sci-hub style theft and encourage users to join steem in droves around the world to get access to valuable resources they otherwise couldn't afford.

Funding

Funding would come in a kind of 'circle jerk' form as is traditional on the steem interfaces, with supporting professionals, curious readers and manual curators such as steemSTEM adding value.

I envisage groups investing their own money for a greater return whilst building an exponential STEM community which would also evolve STEEM into a more reputable internet database.

Potentially, businesses could be woo'd into providing larger investments with the confidence that they would not only have their delegations secured to be returned at will, but the actual funding in the form of upvotes would be far less painful for them than traditional direct funding.

A 1,000,000 Steem investment delegation could provide $300 chunks of funding per post on a given subject, and that's ignoring the support from outside minds supporting the project.

Freedom

Possibly the best aspect of this is that the researchers could possibly have creative freedom to do with their work what they please, be it debates or humourous experiences or intense analyses - it would be their responsibility to maximise their own profits - unless they were being funded by one of those said business investors, then they could literally post memes. Related memes, hopefully.

What do you think?

The next thing for me to do is small, since I cannot implement the idea, nor can I refine it, but for now I'd appreciate it if readers trashed the idea below so I can find out if it has any obvious yet fatal flaws in its concept.

Meanwhile I'm going to get in touch with some individuals who have had personal experiences struggling with publishing their work and financing their work, see what they think.

Personally I think this is a fantastic way to grow the steem blockchain in just one of many ways it has potential to transform the world that have yet to be realized. Similar ideas have already been attempted with tokens built on Ethereum, and others have done similar ideas with creative content (such as musiccoin).

The difference is Steem already has an established community on a website that has passed above 1,000 in the most visited websites, on a blockchain that has been ranked the highest on weiss ratings (fastest transaction speed, most transactions, zero fees etc). It could easily steem ahead with this concept and potentilly hit the headlines if successful.

But hey, prove me wrong please!

Cheers!