Simulations for Open Science Token Communities: Designing the Knowledge Commons

The curation and dissemination of new knowledge between peers is one of the key pillars of science and plays an integral role in maintaining the scientific method. Despite the distributed nature of knowledge, its curation is dominated by a handful of gatekeepers that offer an unequal exchange of intellectual property rights for academic prestige to those using their services. The power imbalance between knowledge producers and curators has led to overall systemic inefficiencies with scientific enterprise, fragmented communities, inequity in knowledge accessibility, underutilized intellectual capital, and suboptimal incentives for the stakeholders within the science ecosystem. This work presents alternative models to bootstrap scientific funding within distributed communities. We use generalized dynamical systems to run simulations of the economic activity in science to identify current inefficiencies and inform the future development of peer-to-peer systems optimized for knowledge creation. Content delivery through autonomous knowledge markets utilizing cryptographic access control protocols and peer-review reward mechanisms is shown to allow for programmable conditional incentives.