May 24, 2023 • 54 mins
In this episode, we explore innovation and interruption in the research community with Jason Barkeloo, founder of the open science platform Therapoid. We talk about building a parallel pathway for innovation, one that provides open technologies, lab equipment, and microgrants and builds reputation through blockchain technologies, with the goal of providing more researchers access to scientific resources. We get a bit nerdy and dig into persistent identifiers, cryptocurrency, open regulation, mitigating exploitation. And I push back about the practicalities of adopting Web 3 when Web 2 is still incompletely integrated into scholarly workflows. Join us for a delightful conversation about opening up science!
To learn more about We Interrupt and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.
You can find more about Jason on LinkedIn, and explore the Therapoid open science ecosystem at https://therapoid.net/.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
I'm not here to replace the Western lockdown model.
That's not our goal.
Our goal is to provide a parallel path for those that can't participate in that closed silo model.
Hi,
welcome to We Interrupt.
(00:23):
I'm Laure Haak, your host.
In this podcast, we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity,
connection,
reducing power imbalances and building inclusive communities.
In this episode, we explore innovation and interruption in the research community with Jason Barkeloo,
(00:47):
founder of the open science platform, Therapoid.
We talk about building a parallel pathway for innovation,
one that provides open technologies,
lab equipment and micro grants, and builds reputation through Blockchain technologies,
with the goal of providing more researchers access to scientific resources.
We get a bit nerdy and dig into persistent identifiers,
(01:09):
cryptocurrency,
open regulation and mitigating exploitation.
And I push back about the practicalities of adopting Web 3.0
when Web 2.0 is still incompletely integrated into scholarly workflows.
It's a lot of fun.
Join us for a delightful conversation about opening up science.
(01:40):
Jason, I'm so so glad to have you here with us today.
You have a really interesting career that spans stints in the Army,
the Troops to Teachers program,
and then after almost completing your PhD program,
you jumped into starting your own company.
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about who you are, so that the folks who are listening can learn a little bit more about you before we jump into interruptions.
(02:05):
Sure.
So, like a lot of people,
I kind of didn't do well in high school.
I had no direction.
I had no guidance.
I had no money.
I picked up Coke bottles along the side of the road and cashed them in so I could have a bagel for breakfast.
So I came from that kind of background,
(02:25):
barely got through high school, and the Army said,
hey,
come here and we'll teach you and we'll give you some money and
you can invest in a college fund.
And I was like,
well,
what else am I gonna do?
I go and,
and I do that and I was really good at it.
They put me through college.
I graduate,
(02:46):
I go back on active duty as an officer and I have a number of assignments through that.
But I ended up running a significant medical research laboratory,
an Army research lab out of Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
And that really solidly put me back into the science arena. That was the spark.
That was the one where I said,
(03:06):
oh my God,
you know,
this is the footing that I wanna go on.
I was in a PhD program and I was cranking along with that, got to the dissertation.
I had invented a technology to help people with special needs
interact with digital content,
essentially something that was analogous to the GUI [graphical user interface].
(03:27):
And we called it a touch user interface.
And so I left my PhD program, all coursework done,
no dissertation complete, and launched the first company to do this really cool touch user interface technology.
I had so much fun doing it.
I raised my first investor guy who broke the check for $75,000 and I was like,
(03:50):
oh my God,
this guy really believes in me!
I came to discover how difficult it was to raise capital.
But that one was the one that I felt validated.
And I said,
OK,
I'm gonna leave the PhD program,
I'm gonna launch this company
And then I got good uptake! Freescale Semiconductor partnered with me and helped us build the firmware and hardware that we built with this touch user interface, that then spiraled into more depth into engineering and science.
(04:23):
I exited that company with an idea for developing a micro-organism that would metabolize organic compounds in wastewater, and throw off direct current electricity while it remediated the wastewater.
Long story short, we accomplished that. We genetically engineered a pathogen that forms a biofilm.
(04:45):
So we filed a patent.
The US government pulled that patent and sent it through national security review.
So we had to have five federal agencies check off on the ability for this to get patented.
It got through security review,
and ultimately, they fast-track the patent.
That caught wind across the infrastructure of wastewater and energy because it solves that nexus problem.
(05:12):
And so a publicly traded company stepped in and said,
hey,
we wanna buy just the patent.
So I exited that company. That then stimulated me into an open science effort,
six years ago, maybe.
The goal there was to build an environment, really an end to end ecosystem, whereby researchers could come in and get access to technologies that are just sitting dormant.
(05:38):
And so we got really good traction on that.
National Institutes of Health,
some universities,
they dumped a boatload of intellectual properties (IP) on us.
And now the question was,
how do we encourage, incentivize, and support researchers around the world to now pick those intellectual properties up moving forward?
And that got me saying,
(05:59):
ok,
well,
if we can do this with IP,
how much surplus lab equipment is out there?
And it's mind boggling how much surplus lab equipment is sitting in storage at major institutions,
not going anywhere.
So we went and said,
hey,
we have this idea.
We're gonna build a Craigslist essentially for lab equipment.
How would you like to provide this stuff to the global community?
(06:23):
And we have had a great response on that.
So now I'm holding these two things (06:25):
surplus lab equipment and surplus intellectual properties.
And I said,
ok,
well,
they need funding,
the researchers will need funding for this.
So let's build a grant model.
The grant model really became a micro grant system that we would fund.
So they,
they adopt these IPs, we give some funding,
(06:47):
they can use the funding to get ahold of and ship lab equipment.
Now,
what are they gonna do with the results?
And we thought,
well,
we're not gonna build a journal,
an open access journal per se anytime soon.
But let's build out a knowledge center that could evolve into a preprint server.
The thing that really catalyzed everything was, I was at Reddit.
(07:10):
This is,
I don't know,
four years ago, and I'm reading through the Science Reddit and I'm like there are ideas in here that people are posting and most of it's a,
a train wreck.
There is a lot of garbage. But within that were nuggets of information that were of value.
And two days later,
(07:30):
it was gone.
And I thought, what if we did a message board system that would award DOIs to important community upvoted pieces of micro-information. That then led us into cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology.
So that stimulated the last thought,
which is, what about the ones that aren't being seen?
(07:53):
This is a Linux opportunity.
We can open source all of this stuff and we can award DOIs and cryptocurrency to help those people become part of the system,
which then solves another significant problem which is employers looking for talent.
It's a win for the researchers and students and it's a win for the recruiters.
(08:17):
We spent 3.5 years, made it through COVID building this ecosystem.
It was quite an undertaking,
but we just launched and we're getting really good uptake.
One of the questions I have just right on top of that:
when we talk about open science,
there's different understandings of what open means.
(08:38):
For example,
some people equate open with free.
If it's free,
then it's open.
But some things that are free aren't really open because the information about the thing that's free
isn't full enough to really be able to use this thing appropriately,
right?
So,
you know,
one of the words we use in this realm is metadata.
(08:58):
If the metadata doesn't describe it,
if this thing isn't discoverable,
even if it's free,
it just doesn't matter.
There's also these questions about open and what does access mean.
So one of the things that you started off with was this touch screen
that enabled accessibility to an object.
(09:20):
Then we talk about accessibility of things like,
like you said,
technologies,
lab equipment,
et cetera,
those aren't necessarily free on the back end.
There are some ways that you've gone through to figure out how to fund both collection of the information about these items,
but also the shipping
(09:40):
to the people who want to use them.
And so it's interesting when you talk about open,
but also a lot of the things that your platform delivers are classic examples of,
of close-ness.
And so let's talk a bit about what you mean by open
and how what your platform does might actually transform how we think about some aspects of how we do technology development.
(10:04):
I kind of look at this as a multi-layer environment open.
And so Linux is at the least common denominator,
the foundational level for software.
Linux is the example of open,
but we wouldn't think of software being open at Linux level.
(10:27):
We would think about it on an app that we would download that would do a function for us.
Open Science is at the fundamental level.
It is at the building block level because if everything can be built at a freely available and accessible level,
everything that's scaffolded above that can also be free and available.
(10:50):
Now,
a great example of that is we're at the front of something called Decentralized Science (DeSci), and DeSci as you're familiar with, is one of the pillars of everything that we're doing now technologically in the science world.
This is a technological development on the blockchain to make technologies utilize a standard decentralized DeSci environment so that everything scaffolded above that can remain free and open to everybody.
(11:25):
So we don't focus on the content.
We think contents at the end,
For me, the focus should be on the very front end of that,
not on the back end, and let everything migrate to the content.
Giving students and researchers access to,
to not just grants but surplus lab equipment or surplus patents,
(11:48):
giving them access to those things at a fundamental level,
eliminates many of the cost barriers that they encounter moving forward.
And because we utilize a CC creative commons-like model in exchange for getting access to all of these things,
everything they create must remain free and open.
(12:11):
And so there's kind of an anti-plagiarism like model that's built in there that says if you steal something that's free,
you're gonna have a hard time collaborating with anybody else out there.
And so why would you? Because the labor force that's available if you keep it open and free is tremendous.
(12:31):
Linux buried Microsoft.
Nothing against Microsoft, but Microsoft had Windows NT and they simply could not hire the labor force to outcompete Linux.
And so Linux ended up getting so big on this huge labor force that was based on people doing it with passion that Microsoft adopted it and became a distributor for it.
(12:54):
And so the key is to touch into that research and student community where the passion already exists,
now enabling them to execute on that passion.
So, coming back to open,
there are the FAIR principles, and clearly supportive of that, things like interoperability that has to be at a fundamental level,
(13:16):
right?
Reuse (13:17):
fundamental level.
These things have to be at a fundamental level in order to scaffold above them.
So when we say open science,
we're not talking about an open access journal.
We think that if you do it under the development under a CC license,
then by default,
it's open access.
We don't have to run around and convince publishers to go open access, because at the end of the day,
(13:41):
this stuff is already out there as an open access and the costs were absorbed through the process of the build.
So the researchers don't have that tail end cost dropped on them.
Their proof of science on the blockchain allowed them to generate economic opportunity that removes that tail end high cost.
(14:07):
It's all spread out over that period of time and covered by the crypto that
that they earn through that proof of science.
One of the challenges or questions that comes up with Web 3.0, blockchain, crypto, and,
and I think to some degree also what you're doing with providing lab equipment reminds me a bit of your story about,
(14:30):
I think it was your third start up, the pathogen with the biofilm that you had gone to patent, and it got stuck in patenting,
because people were concerned about the implications of this particular technology.
One of the challenges or opportunities here is,
is this idea of regulation.
And so there's open,
right,
which is,
hey,
here's all this stuff. Have at it.
(14:52):
Go do some really cool science.
And there's another side of this,
which is what if the cool science somebody does is to go bioengineer
a new pathogen that kills half the world,
right?
And so there's open and there's open.
Based on your experience in this space, how would you think about open and the kinds of research that probably really do need some kind of regulation so that we don't end up with super crazy,
(15:21):
you know,
James Bond style villains running around all over the place.
Yeah.
So there's kind of two angles to this.
The first one is this stuff's already available,
right?
I mean,
if it's patented,
it's already available in the public domain,
that's the first one.
The second one is the proliferation of knowledge is so significant now that even if you wanted to draw a regulation around taking a pathogen and supercharging it.
(15:47):
In our case,
we removed the pathogenicity.
But on the flip side,
what if I took something and created a pathogen out of it?
Well,
guess what?
That technology is already out there.
You can take CRISPR and you can go out and knock in or out genes and create a pathogen.
So from an open perspective,
that knowledge is already out there.
(16:09):
And so it falls really to the culture of science to somewhat self regulate.
So in a way by opening these things up,
we increase the number of eyeballs that see what's going on.
And the labor force that's required to move that on is fairly significant.
And the organization that's trying to do whatever it is they're trying to do as a bad actor,
(16:33):
needs a labor force to do that.
And so by pulling this out of the silence, in opening it up,
we actually provide a huge amount of eyeballs and view to what's being done.
That's why Linux is so successful.
It's so secure because so many people have worked on it and they're the ones that kicked the tires and said,
(16:57):
hey,
we need to make this secure.
The Windows NT wasn't as secure and it could never become a secure because it didn't have the labor force working on it in an open way.
One of the things that also comes in with openness is this idea of sustainability.
So we're creating these platforms,
(17:17):
that people are putting their time and energy into because they're passionate about the platform,
partly because it's open,
partly because of what it does.
There's, two more forces that are happening for me here.
One is people volunteering their time for the creation of something that they are passionate about,
(17:38):
but may not get compensated for their time and effort.
So there's that part, and the other part which is who is,
who's kind of minding the store and making sure that this thing that everyone is pouring their lifeblood into has some kind of operational plan for sustainability,
whether that sustainability means we're gonna start paying some of these people.
(18:01):
but also that we're gonna set up like you said,
the security infrastructure and the operational infrastructure,
et cetera,
that means this thing is gonna have a life and some legs to move forward on.
So how do you consider those kinds of things in this framework that you've been building?
How do we acknowledge the work of the volunteers and the passion of those volunteers?
(18:24):
And I know you're gonna start talking about blockchain, and then how do we think about that operational component?
In the work that I've been doing in the decentralized science space,
a lot of folks get so excited about the technology that they're not necessarily thinking about
how do we sustain this effort over time? Sustaining an effort isn't just building a blockchain.
(18:46):
There's a lot more going on there.
So help me understand your thinking in this space of sustainability and openness.
Yeah,
you've got a lot wrapped up in that.
Your experience has wrapped a lot of questions and information in there.
Technology,
for me --
you haven't heard me say we're a cryptocurrency company.
(19:09):
We're not a blockchain company.
We're not an HTML company.
Right?
These are all just underlying technologies.
It's really saying that we want to create a team-like approach, and in order to do that, you have to incentivize it.
But if somebody is doing a peer review,
(19:29):
there are many times they're not paid,
right?
And then they don't even receive recognition beyond the editor or the publisher that's engaged them to do this free work.
From my perspective that proof of science that,
that you would put together under the technology,
the blockchain example, that proof of science, has this continuum that says, I have a passion and I want that passion to be expressed in reviewing articles,
(20:03):
well,
that person's already doing it,
right?
They're already doing that.
So the question is not at the content level,
how do we help them at the content level?
It's the flip side to it,
which is how do we help them become peer reviewers with grants,
(20:23):
with lab equipment with DOIs, with crypto, with NFTS, as we're supporting that person to do what it is they want to do in an open way.
So I'm not here to replace the Western lockdown model.
(20:44):
That's not our goal.
Our goal is to provide a parallel path for those that can't participate in that closed silo model.
The closed silo model is not gonna go away and it actually has benefits to exist.
It creates competitive environment, and competitive environments as we know,
have a lot of positivity for the progress of things like technology.
(21:07):
The Alice case which said software can't be patented, did the opposite of what everybody thought it would do in the patent world.
It actually exploded the proliferation of competitiveness, so that everybody was competing to get their product into the market space.
And only those that win are winning with brand and customer service and customer support and value proposition.
(21:34):
And so, all of a sudden instead of locking it down and saying,
OK,
we remove the competitive environment because this is a lockdown,
we can put out whatever we want to put out and you've got to take it.
So we want that parallel path so that everybody else can play.
They can't play in the the locked siloed one where everybody is concerned about getting scooped.
(21:55):
Great.
Let that exist,
continue that model and everybody will be fine over there.
But what about all the people that aren't participating,
right?
The millions of researchers and students out there that aren't participating.
So let's give them an open environment.
So open science for us isn't about what goes on at the cost level of publishing.
(22:20):
Ours is about what goes on in the cost level before the work the researcher does.
How do we,
how do we remove those costs and,
and encourage them?
And there is a regulatory framework.
Our terms of service is stupidly long.
(22:40):
I wish it didn't have to be as long. It's almost like Apple Computer's terms of service.
When you get the latest operating system,
download it,
it's off the charts long,
but it's built on a simple framework of a creative commons 4.0 share alike model.
We've just taken that and exploded it out and said,
if you get a free piece of equipment,
(23:02):
you agree that it remains free and open to everybody, and you're not going to sell it on eBay.
And by the way,
if you do sell it on eBay,
you're gonna get caught and you're gonna be removed from the community by the community.
So we, from a sustainability perspective,
we act as a B Corp,
but from an execution perspective,
we act as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO),
(23:25):
right?
So we have these three different organizational structures that we've built this entire open framework around, to simply say to the research community,
everything you do here,
you're gonna get recognition for,
you're gonna get opportunities for.
But everything you do after that has to remain free and open to everybody.
(23:48):
And if it doesn't,
everything that you were doing before that's gonna be removed,
going into the future.
So one of the challenges we have is the attribution component.
And so, in the Web 2.0 world,
we talk about persistent identifiers.
As you said,
the DOIs (digital object identifiers) for documents and data sets,
(24:12):
there's identifiers for the researchers themselves.
There's now identifiers for organizations and there's a new identifier that's coming forward for projects.
These constellations of groups of people and,
and that all these people who work together to
progress and idea
And so I'm used to thinking about attribution as a constellation of these open persistent identifiers that a researcher,
(24:39):
a lab,
whatever agglomerates over the course of doing research.
And that in an ideal world, which does not yet exist, that these identifiers become embedded in the components of that research process.
So it could be embedded at,
let's say a university level.
(24:59):
Here's a university with its identifier.
Here's all the people that are affiliated with this university.
Awesome.
It could be embedded in our research,
a data set.
Here's all the people that contributed to this data set and there's a DOI on the data set and a DOI for the website,
whatever,
et cetera,
et cetera.
And there's DOIs for papers and patents and all kinds of things.
So that's the way I think about this.
(25:21):
I know that this is a,
it's a model that can work that does work.
But one of the biggest challenges in this model is adoption of the technology for both,
bringing together these identifiers,
collecting an ID from a person,
for example,
assigning an ID for a data set,
for example,
but not even that (25:42):
it's ensuring that these identifiers and assertions remain embedded in documents, in process pieces,
right?
As those documents exist in,
in the world,
right?
And so I look at that and say,
if we have trouble at this seemingly very basic level of trying to say here's an identifier that just gets ingested and becomes a part of a paper or a part of the data set.
(26:10):
If we can't do that,
then how do we do blockchain which is orders of magnitude more difficult when it comes to technology,
how does blockchain work?
And that's where I get stuck.
I mean,
I get the concept of blockchain.
I get that it's a series of, in my head, assertions that are locked up next to each other that travel along with the person or an object.
(26:35):
But I,
I don't understand how that actually will work,
given the environment that I know about, this digital environment that is just so patchy in research.
So there's this idea,
there's a vision.
How does this actually work?
Yeah.
One of the great things about blockchain is that it provides an immutable provenance.
(27:01):
So if you NFT right,
you create a non fungible token.
The best way to think of that is a,
a digital rights management wrapper around a digital object. If I can wrap a DRM around that,
that has provenance,
that ties to reputation.
(27:24):
So now I'm able to take a DRM framework,
wrap that around provenance and reputation, and move that along with that digital object.
Every step of the movement of that digital object, reputation is pulled with it and provenance is pulled with it all at once.
(27:45):
I don't wanna get too far afield here,
but we all in the space have something called a public wallet address.
If you're in the blockchain space,
you have a public wallet address.
Well,
that's a serial number.
If you see where I'm going with this serial number,
it has the same serial number potential that you get with a patent number,
(28:10):
right?
Patent number is unique to that particular digital object or that document.
It's similar to an ORCID ID.
It becomes the framework of an identification system that pulls provenance, pulls reputation,
pulls identity, pulls proof of science,
(28:34):
proof of work,
which then pulls along behind it,
things like crypto awards.
So you wrap all that up into this digital rights management-like framework, and you take all of those other things which are now spread all over the place and they're all cobbled together and it puts them in one nice little egg that moves along and can be monetized.
(28:57):
If it's done out of our environment,
it can be monetized in our environment.
It guarantees when it gets out to the public,
it guarantees that reputation,
it guarantees that identity,
it guarantees that provenance,
it guarantees that object.
It's a significant game changer in taking this quilt,
(29:19):
this patchwork of all these different things,
and the blockchain gives us,
I always like to say it gives us the spine to put the ribs on.
So,
I hear you.
But I'm still,
I still have this gap right between the potential of the technology and the application and adoption of the technology, because I feel like I've had the same conversation a lot of times when I used to run ORCID.
(29:48):
ORCID is so simple.
It's just an ID.
It's 16 digits long with orcid.org in front of it. 53- 00:29:54,849 --> 00:30:00,939 All you have to do is stick a single-sign-on piece onto whatever platform you have,
collect that identifier,
blah -- and you are off to the races! Just embed the ID -- like a wrapper -- in the stuff that's produced... blah blah blah
(30:08):
And how many times did we run into people asking folks to type in their ID instead of using single-sign-on?
Because for whatever reason,
single-sign-on was too hard to do.
Like, don't let people type in their ID.
There needs to be a proof that this person is who they say they are. Use single-sign-on.
We still have trouble with that message.
(30:30):
And then we have things like
OK, they used single-sign-on,
they brought the identifier into the system.
It should be part of the metadata,
right?
This wrapper around whatever is being produced, a data set, a paper, or whatever,
you have a person identifier and somehow during the processing of the document through whatever workflow,
the document or the process goes from digital to analog to digital again.
(30:56):
And there's a manual transfer of data from one digital system to another digital system.
And all the proofs that went with the original identifier collection get lost somewhere and you got this unproofed thing.
And that was simple stuff:
one identifier and workflow.
And I'm looking at what you're doing and I'm saying this all sounds awesome.
(31:19):
I mean,
I know some people would have issues with DRM wrappers,
but let's not go there.
I just don't understand, given what I have experienced in this whole world of digital-ness,
and, it's just I just don't understand how it is,
(31:39):
it actually works.
Is it adopted?
Who is the "they" that's producing the wrapper and how can we be assured, as creators of the science,
that our wallet ID or whatever,
whatever pieces of this, are actually going to get asserted into this wrapper and can carry along with this thing that we've created throughout its lifetime.
(32:07):
I get that blockchain is here forever.
I just don't understand,
is it working?
And how does it work?
I mean,
actually practically is this working?
Yeah.
So a a great way to to think about this is Laure, I would just say you,
we take a team out,
(32:28):
you decide that you're going to create some knowledge and you put this knowledge together, whatever it was behind it,
that was all done in an open environment.
All of that stuff now has generated some value for you and that value was captured before the digital object was created.
(32:50):
But now you've got this digital object and it goes out and say it's published in an open access journal and there is your name.
But to that object,
that's a flat piece of object,
right?
It's a PDF and it's flat,
right?
And what we really propose to do is to put things on top of that PDF,
(33:16):
right.
PDFs aren't gonna go away anytime soon.
So you have to take that and build off of it so I can take your reputation and tie it to that.
And because your reputation is spread across the blockchain,
we know in an immutable way that you are who you say you are
(33:36):
and you are Laure Haak.
You are right here.
And if there's other people named that or pretend to be named that all we have to do is look at the chain and say no,
this is the actual person who created that digital object.
And then we can tie,
not only your identity,
but we can tie your reputation to it.
So,
everything that defines you reputation is now on that digital object.
(34:02):
Now,
when we talk about the digital rights management shell...
I've been in the DRM space,
you know,
my first patent was in DRM.
So my reckoning of digital rights management is, I wanna put a shell around this and move this conglomerate along now because it's all open.
(34:28):
The only way you're gonna be able to generate revenues off of that isn't off the object itself because that was generated through open things,
but you can generate revenues here.
So as that moves along,
somebody says,
oh my goodness,
look at what this person,
look at her reputation,
look at the objects that she's created.
(34:49):
I wonder if she'd like to be a consultant for us.
So it takes that CV kind of thing where there's no validation,
right?
There's nothing that says what's there is accurate.
And now this says it is accurate and here's the accuracy that's shown in an immutable way.
(35:11):
So we're moving that egg,
that digital rights management egg, that encapsulates everything inside it.
We're moving that all around the world for you.
The chain is moving it for you.
I get the technology and I get the that it can work,
(35:31):
right?
So my recent experience with Web three at a conference was,
I got a wallet.
I had the public wallet address and I had to use that to register for the conference.
Awesome.
This sounds great.
There's a nice verification of who I am.
(35:51):
I can use my public wallet address.
It never worked.
I had to try three or four times, and at the end of the day they're like,
you know what,
this isn't working,
just register with your email address.
So
I really like this concept you have of creating like a parallel or second way,
(36:14):
another way of doing science where the tools are more open,
the information is more open,
the teams are more open,
right?
That we can see and engage more people in the actual doing of research.
You can see,
you can see provenance and reputation.
That's the key piece here.
Yes, and it isn't tied up in your affiliated reputation because of where you work,
(36:41):
for example,
right?
Mike Sharples, one of our advisors, wrote a seminal paper I think in,
in I wanna say 2016,
he wrote a seminal paper about utilizing blockchain for reputation.
And I always look back to that paper as the fundamental piece of why blockchain has this significant amount of opportunity for things like identity and reputation.
(37:14):
It takes that centralized environment where there is no validation and opens that up.
So there is validation so open science isn't just the technology,
but it's also the identity and reputation being open and available.
(37:37):
Because at the end of the day,
you are the scientist,
not the paper,
the paper is not the scientist.
That's where all of the attention goes in the publishing world,
it goes to the document,
but it should actually go to the knowledge producer.
And that's where the value proposition should go.
(37:59):
The way it is now,
you wrote a paper,
you now leverage that to get a grant,
right.
Right.
I used to think the same way, and I still mostly do think that same way.
And I remember sitting at one point in Paris at the OECD at a workshop about the use of,
again, persistent identifiers,
in the patenting ecosystem.
(38:21):
And I'm sitting in the room with,
a person at that time who's the head of CrossRef
and OECD folks, as well as a bunch of people from very big companies,
who like to patent.
And I was like,
exactly what you said,
we need to recognize the people that create these patents.
(38:41):
And you know what their response was?
It's not the people,
it's our company.
Our company -- and those people working in them --
but our company produced that patent.
So people are basically immaterial.
That's right.
Yeah,
I totally see that. That's why we're not looking to change that, Laure.
(39:02):
We're saying, let there be an alternative pathway.
The problem with disruption is if,
if one sets out to disrupt something that's already in place --
I have a colleague who has a really brilliant idea for making PDFs a scaffold.
And the philosophy was, we're not going to eliminate the PDF.
(39:26):
Let's figure out how we can enhance the PDF.
So I'm not looking to disrupt the traditional company-driven patent environment.
Close it down.
No way.
My focus is Africa,
Asia,
Latin America,
all that talent,
(39:46):
they just need to be enabled and they have to be enabled in an open way because we want them to be seen.
If they're seen, they get opportunities.
And so the open side for us is, that's where the value is.
It's in those 5 million STEM in China every year,
the 3 million in India, every year.
(40:06):
All of those STEM talents spread across the world.
Nobody's looking at what they're publishing because most of them aren't able to participate in the publishing environment.
So if you create an open environment,
a Linux-like environment on a github,
now all of a sudden those people are able to all collaborate in an open way with all the tools and awards that everybody else in the other side gets,
(40:32):
only, they don't have to worry about a company.
Right.
Right, they don't have to work at a company.
So, as somebody who works in data sovereignty issues,
there's "open" and then there's" let's not steal knowledge from certain groups of people and use them to further the West".
(40:54):
You know what I'm saying?
I hear what you're saying.
I think what you're saying is pretty awesome.
Creating another way of doing science.
You're not disrupting what's already there.
You're providing,
(I'm gonna use this word) an alternative way.
Right?
Awesome.
My worry:
people are gonna be listening to this and saying,
well,
(41:15):
here's another Westerner that's going down and finding ways to exploit the scientists in countries that don't have the money and the infrastructure that Western scientists do.
They're gonna do all the stuff openly.
They won't own any of the IP and it's just gonna be stolen and repurposed by the folks in the West for,
(41:38):
for whatever.
What do you say about that?
Yeah.
Well,
that's an easy answer.
Actually, those are the ones that my investors,
in their first blush, at what they potentially are looking at in due diligence.
OK.
So we're gonna help fund all of these people doing all of this work and then some company steps in and absorbs and monetizes what was developed by those researchers.
(42:08):
And the answer is good we want them to because they're gonna pull the identity and reputation of those creators with it. I'm not gonna mention a company,
but a company says,
wow,
look at all of this content that was developed and we don't have to pay for it.
(42:31):
So we're gonna absorb it.
We're gonna go out and make money.
Absolutely wonderful.
And the creator of it who's not embedded in the Western system now gets reputation,
gets view.
And the company says the only way we're gonna be able to monetize that is we bring the team on board to build the product because they're the experts.
(42:54):
Mhm.
So the company says,
well,
we're gonna bring in that knowledge and we're gonna take that knowledge to market.
Are you gonna do it without a team?
Well,
the people that designed it are the team.
Why would you not extend out to them and provide them the opportunity to be involved in that?
And if it's open,
(43:14):
they can't lock it down.
Everybody now can benefit from that shell,
that egg that's moved along just because company A pulled that egg in and monetized it,
doesn't mean company B can't pull that egg in and monetize it, and neither one of them can lock it down because they got access to it through a creative commons 4.0 share.
(43:36):
And what they're gonna make money off of is what they build around it.
Yeah,
it's prior art.
The moment it was created out there in the open environment,
it's now prior art.
And so even if I absorb it as a company and I wanna monetize it.
I can't lock it down because there's prior art in place and you can't patent on prior art.
So that's the beauty of this is that now the creators out here have all of these organizations adopting the stuff that they developed and their reputation and identity gets pulled with all of those that becomes the team that really supports all of this stuff.
(44:14):
Long term.
If there's something that I am concerned about,
it's that the researchers get pigeonholed.
So what happens if, in our case,
for example,
we developed a synthetic biotechnology and that was seen for wastewater and energy only.
But what about the other applications that existed for it?
(44:35):
Well,
they kinda get lost because we get pigeonholed into this one application or two applications.
So we have to make it available where it's interdisciplinary as well as centrally focused on a team.
And one of the great things about blockchain is again,
it shows that provenance,
it shows exactly where it originated.
(44:56):
So that creative commons 4.0 share alike terms of service follows that intellectual property wherever it goes because it's all wrapped up in the metadata.
As long as it doesn't get lost somewhere.
It can't,
it's on the blockchain.
Right.
Once it's on the chain,
(45:16):
somebody on a central server can't go in and manipulate the information or dump it. Good luck with that.
You'd have to get a 51% attack on the chain to make that happen.
That's probably not gonna happen in our lifetime.
Maybe with quantum computing,
it does at some point down the road.
But in the short term,
it doesn't.
So, to conclude that thought is, we want that intellectual property absorbed by everybody.
(45:45):
I'm gonna give one example.
At the Ohio State University,
some professor with their students created an arsenic remediation technology.
Now a water treatment company,
Veolia, General Electric, whomever, says that's not a big enough market,
there isn't enough arsenic out there in the drinking water to justify us licensing that technology and building a team to commercialize it.
(46:12):
Well,
if you're in India,
in rural India,
arsenic is a big problem in wells.
So the Ohio State University says we're not going to be able to license this.
So let's just open it up.
Now,
they got brand recognition,
the fact that I just mentioned the University,
they just got brand recognition,
didn't cost them a penny.
They opened that up.
(46:32):
Now teams around the world say we're gonna build technologies around that core technology, which has metadata from the Ohio State University,
the inventors within it, and we're gonna develop these technologies against that core technology.
And now an entrepreneur steps in and says,
you know what? I can make 10 cents per gallon or 100 gallons to remediate well water, and the Indian government pays for that.
(47:03):
And so the social good now comes out of it.
The entrepreneur wins,
the community wins,
the inventor wins, the institution wins.
And the nice thing about it is that information moves all the way to the end and guess who got the reputation and identity for it started all the way back here at that beginning.
(47:28):
And it's all Creative Commons 4.0 share alike
all the way through to the terminal end where a woman is pulling water out of a well and she's not poisoned with arsenic.
That is open science.
That's how it works.
So I wanna bring us back to the purpose of this podcast,
(47:49):
which is all about interruptions.
We've talked a bit about disruption.
We've talked about creating pathways,
parallel pathways.
I'm wondering how you think about interruption in this work.
Do you think disruption and interruption is the same thing? What is the role of interruption in innovation?
Interruptions for me as entrepreneur are pivots. Something isn't working right.
(48:40):
You recognize it's not working.
And you interrupt the pathway that you're currently on and you pivot to another pathway.
I'm looking at interruptions as an informed break in a pathway, if that makes sense.
I love this idea of pivot.
I really love that idea.
(49:01):
So it's not even necessarily a discontinuity.
It's a, I'm here.
I just need to shift my perspective so that I,
I see another way of doing something interesting.
It happens so frequently.
I've got a guy that I'm bringing on the team,
he's a fresh pair of eyes and he says something to me...
(49:23):
like I hadn't thought of that and immediately I see the value, and I stop that pathway and I move it a little bit.
I pivot a little bit and then I call up my tech team and I'm like,
guys,
we gotta pivot and now the tech team is like,
oh my God,
(49:43):
you know, we're already down this way to develop this.
And then it becomes a leadership and a management issue of how you interrupt that pathway and all the resources that are dedicated to the current pathway, to pivot to another pathway. That leadership for that interruption and pivot is what makes or breaks the day.
(50:06):
I'm really interested to see how this takes off.
I know there's already people using the platform.
You've had the open technologies component of it running for a couple years now and I'm really interested to see, from this broader concept of pivoting.
So much conversation has been happening for how many years about reputation and openness in the academy,
(50:35):
And how much effort that,
I mean,
you have an "ABD" PhD and myself a PhD. The time in our lives that we put into getting that PhD and the affiliated halo of that particular certificate.
And think about how can we make it possible for people who want to do research,
(50:59):
whether you have a PhD or not, to actually contribute, is really powerful.
And one of the things I did recently with a colleague of mine, Donna Ginther,
was to look at,
how many researchers are there in the world.
And when you look at this econometric model,
most of the people are defining researcher as somebody who has a PhD.
(51:21):
But then you look at how the UN defines researcher, and it's anyone who contributes to a research process,
two very,
very different definitions.
And what I like about what you're doing is you're enabling more of the UN intent for research.
And I think there's so many pieces in here that make people uncomfortable,
(51:46):
legacy people in the West,
It makes a lot of us uncomfortable and I think that's awesome.
And I think we need to try more things like this just because they make us uncomfortable.
They make us question the ways that we do things,
the why that we do things, and the way that we're doing them.
(52:07):
And to see if this more open science methodology can actually help us as a global community of humans solve our problems in a different and more effective way.
Perhaps.
So I'm gonna keep watching this space,
Jason,
do you wanna say a little bit more about what people should be looking at? The website? Something else?
(52:30):
This open science platform is called Therapoid.
You can just think of Android except it's the Therapoid.
And so right now,
there's complimentary science coins being provided to registrants on the platform.
And when we hit a certain threshold,
the smart contract will shut that off.
The other thing is I would say if you're not interested in the crypto,
(52:53):
if you think the crypto is something that you don't have anything to do with,
you're gonna earn it anyway,
by collaborating,
just push it off to the American Impact Capital Foundation and let them put it into socially conscious charities or socially conscious companies.
We really have built this infrastructure with a socially conscious mindset that says to the research community,
(53:17):
there's ways that you can benefit society beyond just your ideas.
Jason, thank you so much.
I learned a lot.
It's been fun for me to hear how Therapoid has evolved.
I hope other people find this as exciting as I do.
Thanks Laure.
(53:39):
Thank you for joining us.
For more about We Interrupt,
please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com
for show notes, links and other episodes.
Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I really look forward to hearing from you.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(54:02):
I pay my respects to Elders, past and present
and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok’s "Melody with Interruptions", from The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project.
I'm not here to replace the Western lockdown model.
That's not our goal.
Our goal is to provide a parallel path for those that can't participate in that closed silo model.
Hi,
welcome to We Interrupt.
(00:23):
I'm Laure Haak, your host.
In this podcast, we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity,
connection,
reducing power imbalances and building inclusive communities.
In this episode, we explore innovation and interruption in the research community with Jason Barkeloo,
(00:47):
founder of the open science platform, Therapoid.
We talk about building a parallel pathway for innovation,
one that provides open technologies,
lab equipment and micro grants, and builds reputation through Blockchain technologies,
with the goal of providing more researchers access to scientific resources.
We get a bit nerdy and dig into persistent identifiers,
(01:09):
cryptocurrency,
open regulation and mitigating exploitation.
And I push back about the practicalities of adopting Web 3.0
when Web 2.0 is still incompletely integrated into scholarly workflows.
It's a lot of fun.
Join us for a delightful conversation about opening up science.
(01:40):
Jason, I'm so so glad to have you here with us today.
You have a really interesting career that spans stints in the Army,
the Troops to Teachers program,
and then after almost completing your PhD program,
you jumped into starting your own company.
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about who you are, so that the folks who are listening can learn a little bit more about you before we jump into interruptions.
(02:05):
Sure.
So, like a lot of people,
I kind of didn't do well in high school.
I had no direction.
I had no guidance.
I had no money.
I picked up Coke bottles along the side of the road and cashed them in so I could have a bagel for breakfast.
So I came from that kind of background,
(02:25):
barely got through high school, and the Army said,
hey,
come here and we'll teach you and we'll give you some money and
you can invest in a college fund.
And I was like,
well,
what else am I gonna do?
I go and,
and I do that and I was really good at it.
They put me through college.
I graduate,
(02:46):
I go back on active duty as an officer and I have a number of assignments through that.
But I ended up running a significant medical research laboratory,
an Army research lab out of Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
And that really solidly put me back into the science arena. That was the spark.
That was the one where I said,
(03:06):
oh my God,
you know,
this is the footing that I wanna go on.
I was in a PhD program and I was cranking along with that, got to the dissertation.
I had invented a technology to help people with special needs
interact with digital content,
essentially something that was analogous to the GUI [graphical user interface].
(03:27):
And we called it a touch user interface.
And so I left my PhD program, all coursework done,
no dissertation complete, and launched the first company to do this really cool touch user interface technology.
I had so much fun doing it.
I raised my first investor guy who broke the check for $75,000 and I was like,
(03:50):
oh my God,
this guy really believes in me!
I came to discover how difficult it was to raise capital.
But that one was the one that I felt validated.
And I said,
OK,
I'm gonna leave the PhD program,
I'm gonna launch this company
And then I got good uptake! Freescale Semiconductor partnered with me and helped us build the firmware and hardware that we built with this touch user interface, that then spiraled into more depth into engineering and science.
(04:23):
I exited that company with an idea for developing a micro-organism that would metabolize organic compounds in wastewater, and throw off direct current electricity while it remediated the wastewater.
Long story short, we accomplished that. We genetically engineered a pathogen that forms a biofilm.
(04:45):
So we filed a patent.
The US government pulled that patent and sent it through national security review.
So we had to have five federal agencies check off on the ability for this to get patented.
It got through security review,
and ultimately, they fast-track the patent.
That caught wind across the infrastructure of wastewater and energy because it solves that nexus problem.
(05:12):
And so a publicly traded company stepped in and said,
hey,
we wanna buy just the patent.
So I exited that company. That then stimulated me into an open science effort,
six years ago, maybe.
The goal there was to build an environment, really an end to end ecosystem, whereby researchers could come in and get access to technologies that are just sitting dormant.
(05:38):
And so we got really good traction on that.
National Institutes of Health,
some universities,
they dumped a boatload of intellectual properties (IP) on us.
And now the question was,
how do we encourage, incentivize, and support researchers around the world to now pick those intellectual properties up moving forward?
And that got me saying,
(05:59):
ok,
well,
if we can do this with IP,
how much surplus lab equipment is out there?
And it's mind boggling how much surplus lab equipment is sitting in storage at major institutions,
not going anywhere.
So we went and said,
hey,
we have this idea.
We're gonna build a Craigslist essentially for lab equipment.
How would you like to provide this stuff to the global community?
(06:23):
And we have had a great response on that.
So now I'm holding these two things (06:25):
surplus lab equipment and surplus intellectual properties.
And I said,
ok,
well,
they need funding,
the researchers will need funding for this.
So let's build a grant model.
The grant model really became a micro grant system that we would fund.
So they,
they adopt these IPs, we give some funding,
(06:47):
they can use the funding to get ahold of and ship lab equipment.
Now,
what are they gonna do with the results?
And we thought,
well,
we're not gonna build a journal,
an open access journal per se anytime soon.
But let's build out a knowledge center that could evolve into a preprint server.
The thing that really catalyzed everything was, I was at Reddit.
(07:10):
This is,
I don't know,
four years ago, and I'm reading through the Science Reddit and I'm like there are ideas in here that people are posting and most of it's a,
a train wreck.
There is a lot of garbage. But within that were nuggets of information that were of value.
And two days later,
(07:30):
it was gone.
And I thought, what if we did a message board system that would award DOIs to important community upvoted pieces of micro-information. That then led us into cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology.
So that stimulated the last thought,
which is, what about the ones that aren't being seen?
(07:53):
This is a Linux opportunity.
We can open source all of this stuff and we can award DOIs and cryptocurrency to help those people become part of the system,
which then solves another significant problem which is employers looking for talent.
It's a win for the researchers and students and it's a win for the recruiters.
(08:17):
We spent 3.5 years, made it through COVID building this ecosystem.
It was quite an undertaking,
but we just launched and we're getting really good uptake.
One of the questions I have just right on top of that:
when we talk about open science,
there's different understandings of what open means.
(08:38):
For example,
some people equate open with free.
If it's free,
then it's open.
But some things that are free aren't really open because the information about the thing that's free
isn't full enough to really be able to use this thing appropriately,
right?
So,
you know,
one of the words we use in this realm is metadata.
(08:58):
If the metadata doesn't describe it,
if this thing isn't discoverable,
even if it's free,
it just doesn't matter.
There's also these questions about open and what does access mean.
So one of the things that you started off with was this touch screen
that enabled accessibility to an object.
(09:20):
Then we talk about accessibility of things like,
like you said,
technologies,
lab equipment,
et cetera,
those aren't necessarily free on the back end.
There are some ways that you've gone through to figure out how to fund both collection of the information about these items,
but also the shipping
(09:40):
to the people who want to use them.
And so it's interesting when you talk about open,
but also a lot of the things that your platform delivers are classic examples of,
of close-ness.
And so let's talk a bit about what you mean by open
and how what your platform does might actually transform how we think about some aspects of how we do technology development.
(10:04):
I kind of look at this as a multi-layer environment open.
And so Linux is at the least common denominator,
the foundational level for software.
Linux is the example of open,
but we wouldn't think of software being open at Linux level.
(10:27):
We would think about it on an app that we would download that would do a function for us.
Open Science is at the fundamental level.
It is at the building block level because if everything can be built at a freely available and accessible level,
everything that's scaffolded above that can also be free and available.
(10:50):
Now,
a great example of that is we're at the front of something called Decentralized Science (DeSci), and DeSci as you're familiar with, is one of the pillars of everything that we're doing now technologically in the science world.
This is a technological development on the blockchain to make technologies utilize a standard decentralized DeSci environment so that everything scaffolded above that can remain free and open to everybody.
(11:25):
So we don't focus on the content.
We think contents at the end,
For me, the focus should be on the very front end of that,
not on the back end, and let everything migrate to the content.
Giving students and researchers access to,
to not just grants but surplus lab equipment or surplus patents,
(11:48):
giving them access to those things at a fundamental level,
eliminates many of the cost barriers that they encounter moving forward.
And because we utilize a CC creative commons-like model in exchange for getting access to all of these things,
everything they create must remain free and open.
(12:11):
And so there's kind of an anti-plagiarism like model that's built in there that says if you steal something that's free,
you're gonna have a hard time collaborating with anybody else out there.
And so why would you? Because the labor force that's available if you keep it open and free is tremendous.
(12:31):
Linux buried Microsoft.
Nothing against Microsoft, but Microsoft had Windows NT and they simply could not hire the labor force to outcompete Linux.
And so Linux ended up getting so big on this huge labor force that was based on people doing it with passion that Microsoft adopted it and became a distributor for it.
(12:54):
And so the key is to touch into that research and student community where the passion already exists,
now enabling them to execute on that passion.
So, coming back to open,
there are the FAIR principles, and clearly supportive of that, things like interoperability that has to be at a fundamental level,
(13:16):
right?
Reuse (13:17):
fundamental level.
These things have to be at a fundamental level in order to scaffold above them.
So when we say open science,
we're not talking about an open access journal.
We think that if you do it under the development under a CC license,
then by default,
it's open access.
We don't have to run around and convince publishers to go open access, because at the end of the day,
(13:41):
this stuff is already out there as an open access and the costs were absorbed through the process of the build.
So the researchers don't have that tail end cost dropped on them.
Their proof of science on the blockchain allowed them to generate economic opportunity that removes that tail end high cost.
(14:07):
It's all spread out over that period of time and covered by the crypto that
that they earn through that proof of science.
One of the challenges or questions that comes up with Web 3.0, blockchain, crypto, and,
and I think to some degree also what you're doing with providing lab equipment reminds me a bit of your story about,
(14:30):
I think it was your third start up, the pathogen with the biofilm that you had gone to patent, and it got stuck in patenting,
because people were concerned about the implications of this particular technology.
One of the challenges or opportunities here is,
is this idea of regulation.
And so there's open,
right,
which is,
hey,
here's all this stuff. Have at it.
(14:52):
Go do some really cool science.
And there's another side of this,
which is what if the cool science somebody does is to go bioengineer
a new pathogen that kills half the world,
right?
And so there's open and there's open.
Based on your experience in this space, how would you think about open and the kinds of research that probably really do need some kind of regulation so that we don't end up with super crazy,
(15:21):
you know,
James Bond style villains running around all over the place.
Yeah.
So there's kind of two angles to this.
The first one is this stuff's already available,
right?
I mean,
if it's patented,
it's already available in the public domain,
that's the first one.
The second one is the proliferation of knowledge is so significant now that even if you wanted to draw a regulation around taking a pathogen and supercharging it.
(15:47):
In our case,
we removed the pathogenicity.
But on the flip side,
what if I took something and created a pathogen out of it?
Well,
guess what?
That technology is already out there.
You can take CRISPR and you can go out and knock in or out genes and create a pathogen.
So from an open perspective,
that knowledge is already out there.
(16:09):
And so it falls really to the culture of science to somewhat self regulate.
So in a way by opening these things up,
we increase the number of eyeballs that see what's going on.
And the labor force that's required to move that on is fairly significant.
And the organization that's trying to do whatever it is they're trying to do as a bad actor,
(16:33):
needs a labor force to do that.
And so by pulling this out of the silence, in opening it up,
we actually provide a huge amount of eyeballs and view to what's being done.
That's why Linux is so successful.
It's so secure because so many people have worked on it and they're the ones that kicked the tires and said,
(16:57):
hey,
we need to make this secure.
The Windows NT wasn't as secure and it could never become a secure because it didn't have the labor force working on it in an open way.
One of the things that also comes in with openness is this idea of sustainability.
So we're creating these platforms,
(17:17):
that people are putting their time and energy into because they're passionate about the platform,
partly because it's open,
partly because of what it does.
There's, two more forces that are happening for me here.
One is people volunteering their time for the creation of something that they are passionate about,
(17:38):
but may not get compensated for their time and effort.
So there's that part, and the other part which is who is,
who's kind of minding the store and making sure that this thing that everyone is pouring their lifeblood into has some kind of operational plan for sustainability,
whether that sustainability means we're gonna start paying some of these people.
(18:01):
but also that we're gonna set up like you said,
the security infrastructure and the operational infrastructure,
et cetera,
that means this thing is gonna have a life and some legs to move forward on.
So how do you consider those kinds of things in this framework that you've been building?
How do we acknowledge the work of the volunteers and the passion of those volunteers?
(18:24):
And I know you're gonna start talking about blockchain, and then how do we think about that operational component?
In the work that I've been doing in the decentralized science space,
a lot of folks get so excited about the technology that they're not necessarily thinking about
how do we sustain this effort over time? Sustaining an effort isn't just building a blockchain.
(18:46):
There's a lot more going on there.
So help me understand your thinking in this space of sustainability and openness.
Yeah,
you've got a lot wrapped up in that.
Your experience has wrapped a lot of questions and information in there.
Technology,
for me --
you haven't heard me say we're a cryptocurrency company.
(19:09):
We're not a blockchain company.
We're not an HTML company.
Right?
These are all just underlying technologies.
It's really saying that we want to create a team-like approach, and in order to do that, you have to incentivize it.
But if somebody is doing a peer review,
(19:29):
there are many times they're not paid,
right?
And then they don't even receive recognition beyond the editor or the publisher that's engaged them to do this free work.
From my perspective that proof of science that,
that you would put together under the technology,
the blockchain example, that proof of science, has this continuum that says, I have a passion and I want that passion to be expressed in reviewing articles,
(20:03):
well,
that person's already doing it,
right?
They're already doing that.
So the question is not at the content level,
how do we help them at the content level?
It's the flip side to it,
which is how do we help them become peer reviewers with grants,
(20:23):
with lab equipment with DOIs, with crypto, with NFTS, as we're supporting that person to do what it is they want to do in an open way.
So I'm not here to replace the Western lockdown model.
(20:44):
That's not our goal.
Our goal is to provide a parallel path for those that can't participate in that closed silo model.
The closed silo model is not gonna go away and it actually has benefits to exist.
It creates competitive environment, and competitive environments as we know,
have a lot of positivity for the progress of things like technology.
(21:07):
The Alice case which said software can't be patented, did the opposite of what everybody thought it would do in the patent world.
It actually exploded the proliferation of competitiveness, so that everybody was competing to get their product into the market space.
And only those that win are winning with brand and customer service and customer support and value proposition.
(21:34):
And so, all of a sudden instead of locking it down and saying,
OK,
we remove the competitive environment because this is a lockdown,
we can put out whatever we want to put out and you've got to take it.
So we want that parallel path so that everybody else can play.
They can't play in the the locked siloed one where everybody is concerned about getting scooped.
(21:55):
Great.
Let that exist,
continue that model and everybody will be fine over there.
But what about all the people that aren't participating,
right?
The millions of researchers and students out there that aren't participating.
So let's give them an open environment.
So open science for us isn't about what goes on at the cost level of publishing.
(22:20):
Ours is about what goes on in the cost level before the work the researcher does.
How do we,
how do we remove those costs and,
and encourage them?
And there is a regulatory framework.
Our terms of service is stupidly long.
(22:40):
I wish it didn't have to be as long. It's almost like Apple Computer's terms of service.
When you get the latest operating system,
download it,
it's off the charts long,
but it's built on a simple framework of a creative commons 4.0 share alike model.
We've just taken that and exploded it out and said,
if you get a free piece of equipment,
(23:02):
you agree that it remains free and open to everybody, and you're not going to sell it on eBay.
And by the way,
if you do sell it on eBay,
you're gonna get caught and you're gonna be removed from the community by the community.
So we, from a sustainability perspective,
we act as a B Corp,
but from an execution perspective,
we act as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO),
(23:25):
right?
So we have these three different organizational structures that we've built this entire open framework around, to simply say to the research community,
everything you do here,
you're gonna get recognition for,
you're gonna get opportunities for.
But everything you do after that has to remain free and open to everybody.
(23:48):
And if it doesn't,
everything that you were doing before that's gonna be removed,
going into the future.
So one of the challenges we have is the attribution component.
And so, in the Web 2.0 world,
we talk about persistent identifiers.
As you said,
the DOIs (digital object identifiers) for documents and data sets,
(24:12):
there's identifiers for the researchers themselves.
There's now identifiers for organizations and there's a new identifier that's coming forward for projects.
These constellations of groups of people and,
and that all these people who work together to
progress and idea
And so I'm used to thinking about attribution as a constellation of these open persistent identifiers that a researcher,
(24:39):
a lab,
whatever agglomerates over the course of doing research.
And that in an ideal world, which does not yet exist, that these identifiers become embedded in the components of that research process.
So it could be embedded at,
let's say a university level.
(24:59):
Here's a university with its identifier.
Here's all the people that are affiliated with this university.
Awesome.
It could be embedded in our research,
a data set.
Here's all the people that contributed to this data set and there's a DOI on the data set and a DOI for the website,
whatever,
et cetera,
et cetera.
And there's DOIs for papers and patents and all kinds of things.
So that's the way I think about this.
(25:21):
I know that this is a,
it's a model that can work that does work.
But one of the biggest challenges in this model is adoption of the technology for both,
bringing together these identifiers,
collecting an ID from a person,
for example,
assigning an ID for a data set,
for example,
but not even that (25:42):
it's ensuring that these identifiers and assertions remain embedded in documents, in process pieces,
right?
As those documents exist in,
in the world,
right?
And so I look at that and say,
if we have trouble at this seemingly very basic level of trying to say here's an identifier that just gets ingested and becomes a part of a paper or a part of the data set.
(26:10):
If we can't do that,
then how do we do blockchain which is orders of magnitude more difficult when it comes to technology,
how does blockchain work?
And that's where I get stuck.
I mean,
I get the concept of blockchain.
I get that it's a series of, in my head, assertions that are locked up next to each other that travel along with the person or an object.
(26:35):
But I,
I don't understand how that actually will work,
given the environment that I know about, this digital environment that is just so patchy in research.
So there's this idea,
there's a vision.
How does this actually work?
Yeah.
One of the great things about blockchain is that it provides an immutable provenance.
(27:01):
So if you NFT right,
you create a non fungible token.
The best way to think of that is a,
a digital rights management wrapper around a digital object. If I can wrap a DRM around that,
that has provenance,
that ties to reputation.
(27:24):
So now I'm able to take a DRM framework,
wrap that around provenance and reputation, and move that along with that digital object.
Every step of the movement of that digital object, reputation is pulled with it and provenance is pulled with it all at once.
(27:45):
I don't wanna get too far afield here,
but we all in the space have something called a public wallet address.
If you're in the blockchain space,
you have a public wallet address.
Well,
that's a serial number.
If you see where I'm going with this serial number,
it has the same serial number potential that you get with a patent number,
(28:10):
right?
Patent number is unique to that particular digital object or that document.
It's similar to an ORCID ID.
It becomes the framework of an identification system that pulls provenance, pulls reputation,
pulls identity, pulls proof of science,
(28:34):
proof of work,
which then pulls along behind it,
things like crypto awards.
So you wrap all that up into this digital rights management-like framework, and you take all of those other things which are now spread all over the place and they're all cobbled together and it puts them in one nice little egg that moves along and can be monetized.
(28:57):
If it's done out of our environment,
it can be monetized in our environment.
It guarantees when it gets out to the public,
it guarantees that reputation,
it guarantees that identity,
it guarantees that provenance,
it guarantees that object.
It's a significant game changer in taking this quilt,
(29:19):
this patchwork of all these different things,
and the blockchain gives us,
I always like to say it gives us the spine to put the ribs on.
So,
I hear you.
But I'm still,
I still have this gap right between the potential of the technology and the application and adoption of the technology, because I feel like I've had the same conversation a lot of times when I used to run ORCID.
(29:48):
ORCID is so simple.
It's just an ID.
It's 16 digits long with orcid.org in front of it. 53- 00:29:54,849 --> 00:30:00,939 All you have to do is stick a single-sign-on piece onto whatever platform you have,
collect that identifier,
blah -- and you are off to the races! Just embed the ID -- like a wrapper -- in the stuff that's produced... blah blah blah
(30:08):
And how many times did we run into people asking folks to type in their ID instead of using single-sign-on?
Because for whatever reason,
single-sign-on was too hard to do.
Like, don't let people type in their ID.
There needs to be a proof that this person is who they say they are. Use single-sign-on.
We still have trouble with that message.
(30:30):
And then we have things like
OK, they used single-sign-on,
they brought the identifier into the system.
It should be part of the metadata,
right?
This wrapper around whatever is being produced, a data set, a paper, or whatever,
you have a person identifier and somehow during the processing of the document through whatever workflow,
the document or the process goes from digital to analog to digital again.
(30:56):
And there's a manual transfer of data from one digital system to another digital system.
And all the proofs that went with the original identifier collection get lost somewhere and you got this unproofed thing.
And that was simple stuff:
one identifier and workflow.
And I'm looking at what you're doing and I'm saying this all sounds awesome.
(31:19):
I mean,
I know some people would have issues with DRM wrappers,
but let's not go there.
I just don't understand, given what I have experienced in this whole world of digital-ness,
and, it's just I just don't understand how it is,
(31:39):
it actually works.
Is it adopted?
Who is the "they" that's producing the wrapper and how can we be assured, as creators of the science,
that our wallet ID or whatever,
whatever pieces of this, are actually going to get asserted into this wrapper and can carry along with this thing that we've created throughout its lifetime.
(32:07):
I get that blockchain is here forever.
I just don't understand,
is it working?
And how does it work?
I mean,
actually practically is this working?
Yeah.
So a a great way to to think about this is Laure, I would just say you,
we take a team out,
(32:28):
you decide that you're going to create some knowledge and you put this knowledge together, whatever it was behind it,
that was all done in an open environment.
All of that stuff now has generated some value for you and that value was captured before the digital object was created.
(32:50):
But now you've got this digital object and it goes out and say it's published in an open access journal and there is your name.
But to that object,
that's a flat piece of object,
right?
It's a PDF and it's flat,
right?
And what we really propose to do is to put things on top of that PDF,
(33:16):
right.
PDFs aren't gonna go away anytime soon.
So you have to take that and build off of it so I can take your reputation and tie it to that.
And because your reputation is spread across the blockchain,
we know in an immutable way that you are who you say you are
(33:36):
and you are Laure Haak.
You are right here.
And if there's other people named that or pretend to be named that all we have to do is look at the chain and say no,
this is the actual person who created that digital object.
And then we can tie,
not only your identity,
but we can tie your reputation to it.
So,
everything that defines you reputation is now on that digital object.
(34:02):
Now,
when we talk about the digital rights management shell...
I've been in the DRM space,
you know,
my first patent was in DRM.
So my reckoning of digital rights management is, I wanna put a shell around this and move this conglomerate along now because it's all open.
(34:28):
The only way you're gonna be able to generate revenues off of that isn't off the object itself because that was generated through open things,
but you can generate revenues here.
So as that moves along,
somebody says,
oh my goodness,
look at what this person,
look at her reputation,
look at the objects that she's created.
(34:49):
I wonder if she'd like to be a consultant for us.
So it takes that CV kind of thing where there's no validation,
right?
There's nothing that says what's there is accurate.
And now this says it is accurate and here's the accuracy that's shown in an immutable way.
(35:11):
So we're moving that egg,
that digital rights management egg, that encapsulates everything inside it.
We're moving that all around the world for you.
The chain is moving it for you.
I get the technology and I get the that it can work,
(35:31):
right?
So my recent experience with Web three at a conference was,
I got a wallet.
I had the public wallet address and I had to use that to register for the conference.
Awesome.
This sounds great.
There's a nice verification of who I am.
(35:51):
I can use my public wallet address.
It never worked.
I had to try three or four times, and at the end of the day they're like,
you know what,
this isn't working,
just register with your email address.
So
I really like this concept you have of creating like a parallel or second way,
(36:14):
another way of doing science where the tools are more open,
the information is more open,
the teams are more open,
right?
That we can see and engage more people in the actual doing of research.
You can see,
you can see provenance and reputation.
That's the key piece here.
Yes, and it isn't tied up in your affiliated reputation because of where you work,
(36:41):
for example,
right?
Mike Sharples, one of our advisors, wrote a seminal paper I think in,
in I wanna say 2016,
he wrote a seminal paper about utilizing blockchain for reputation.
And I always look back to that paper as the fundamental piece of why blockchain has this significant amount of opportunity for things like identity and reputation.
(37:14):
It takes that centralized environment where there is no validation and opens that up.
So there is validation so open science isn't just the technology,
but it's also the identity and reputation being open and available.
(37:37):
Because at the end of the day,
you are the scientist,
not the paper,
the paper is not the scientist.
That's where all of the attention goes in the publishing world,
it goes to the document,
but it should actually go to the knowledge producer.
And that's where the value proposition should go.
(37:59):
The way it is now,
you wrote a paper,
you now leverage that to get a grant,
right.
Right.
I used to think the same way, and I still mostly do think that same way.
And I remember sitting at one point in Paris at the OECD at a workshop about the use of,
again, persistent identifiers,
in the patenting ecosystem.
(38:21):
And I'm sitting in the room with,
a person at that time who's the head of CrossRef
and OECD folks, as well as a bunch of people from very big companies,
who like to patent.
And I was like,
exactly what you said,
we need to recognize the people that create these patents.
(38:41):
And you know what their response was?
It's not the people,
it's our company.
Our company -- and those people working in them --
but our company produced that patent.
So people are basically immaterial.
That's right.
Yeah,
I totally see that. That's why we're not looking to change that, Laure.
(39:02):
We're saying, let there be an alternative pathway.
The problem with disruption is if,
if one sets out to disrupt something that's already in place --
I have a colleague who has a really brilliant idea for making PDFs a scaffold.
And the philosophy was, we're not going to eliminate the PDF.
(39:26):
Let's figure out how we can enhance the PDF.
So I'm not looking to disrupt the traditional company-driven patent environment.
Close it down.
No way.
My focus is Africa,
Asia,
Latin America,
all that talent,
(39:46):
they just need to be enabled and they have to be enabled in an open way because we want them to be seen.
If they're seen, they get opportunities.
And so the open side for us is, that's where the value is.
It's in those 5 million STEM in China every year,
the 3 million in India, every year.
(40:06):
All of those STEM talents spread across the world.
Nobody's looking at what they're publishing because most of them aren't able to participate in the publishing environment.
So if you create an open environment,
a Linux-like environment on a github,
now all of a sudden those people are able to all collaborate in an open way with all the tools and awards that everybody else in the other side gets,
(40:32):
only, they don't have to worry about a company.
Right.
Right, they don't have to work at a company.
So, as somebody who works in data sovereignty issues,
there's "open" and then there's" let's not steal knowledge from certain groups of people and use them to further the West".
(40:54):
You know what I'm saying?
I hear what you're saying.
I think what you're saying is pretty awesome.
Creating another way of doing science.
You're not disrupting what's already there.
You're providing,
(I'm gonna use this word) an alternative way.
Right?
Awesome.
My worry:
people are gonna be listening to this and saying,
well,
(41:15):
here's another Westerner that's going down and finding ways to exploit the scientists in countries that don't have the money and the infrastructure that Western scientists do.
They're gonna do all the stuff openly.
They won't own any of the IP and it's just gonna be stolen and repurposed by the folks in the West for,
(41:38):
for whatever.
What do you say about that?
Yeah.
Well,
that's an easy answer.
Actually, those are the ones that my investors,
in their first blush, at what they potentially are looking at in due diligence.
OK.
So we're gonna help fund all of these people doing all of this work and then some company steps in and absorbs and monetizes what was developed by those researchers.
(42:08):
And the answer is good we want them to because they're gonna pull the identity and reputation of those creators with it. I'm not gonna mention a company,
but a company says,
wow,
look at all of this content that was developed and we don't have to pay for it.
(42:31):
So we're gonna absorb it.
We're gonna go out and make money.
Absolutely wonderful.
And the creator of it who's not embedded in the Western system now gets reputation,
gets view.
And the company says the only way we're gonna be able to monetize that is we bring the team on board to build the product because they're the experts.
(42:54):
Mhm.
So the company says,
well,
we're gonna bring in that knowledge and we're gonna take that knowledge to market.
Are you gonna do it without a team?
Well,
the people that designed it are the team.
Why would you not extend out to them and provide them the opportunity to be involved in that?
And if it's open,
(43:14):
they can't lock it down.
Everybody now can benefit from that shell,
that egg that's moved along just because company A pulled that egg in and monetized it,
doesn't mean company B can't pull that egg in and monetize it, and neither one of them can lock it down because they got access to it through a creative commons 4.0 share.
(43:36):
And what they're gonna make money off of is what they build around it.
Yeah,
it's prior art.
The moment it was created out there in the open environment,
it's now prior art.
And so even if I absorb it as a company and I wanna monetize it.
I can't lock it down because there's prior art in place and you can't patent on prior art.
So that's the beauty of this is that now the creators out here have all of these organizations adopting the stuff that they developed and their reputation and identity gets pulled with all of those that becomes the team that really supports all of this stuff.
(44:14):
Long term.
If there's something that I am concerned about,
it's that the researchers get pigeonholed.
So what happens if, in our case,
for example,
we developed a synthetic biotechnology and that was seen for wastewater and energy only.
But what about the other applications that existed for it?
(44:35):
Well,
they kinda get lost because we get pigeonholed into this one application or two applications.
So we have to make it available where it's interdisciplinary as well as centrally focused on a team.
And one of the great things about blockchain is again,
it shows that provenance,
it shows exactly where it originated.
(44:56):
So that creative commons 4.0 share alike terms of service follows that intellectual property wherever it goes because it's all wrapped up in the metadata.
As long as it doesn't get lost somewhere.
It can't,
it's on the blockchain.
Right.
Once it's on the chain,
(45:16):
somebody on a central server can't go in and manipulate the information or dump it. Good luck with that.
You'd have to get a 51% attack on the chain to make that happen.
That's probably not gonna happen in our lifetime.
Maybe with quantum computing,
it does at some point down the road.
But in the short term,
it doesn't.
So, to conclude that thought is, we want that intellectual property absorbed by everybody.
(45:45):
I'm gonna give one example.
At the Ohio State University,
some professor with their students created an arsenic remediation technology.
Now a water treatment company,
Veolia, General Electric, whomever, says that's not a big enough market,
there isn't enough arsenic out there in the drinking water to justify us licensing that technology and building a team to commercialize it.
(46:12):
Well,
if you're in India,
in rural India,
arsenic is a big problem in wells.
So the Ohio State University says we're not going to be able to license this.
So let's just open it up.
Now,
they got brand recognition,
the fact that I just mentioned the University,
they just got brand recognition,
didn't cost them a penny.
They opened that up.
(46:32):
Now teams around the world say we're gonna build technologies around that core technology, which has metadata from the Ohio State University,
the inventors within it, and we're gonna develop these technologies against that core technology.
And now an entrepreneur steps in and says,
you know what? I can make 10 cents per gallon or 100 gallons to remediate well water, and the Indian government pays for that.
(47:03):
And so the social good now comes out of it.
The entrepreneur wins,
the community wins,
the inventor wins, the institution wins.
And the nice thing about it is that information moves all the way to the end and guess who got the reputation and identity for it started all the way back here at that beginning.
(47:28):
And it's all Creative Commons 4.0 share alike
all the way through to the terminal end where a woman is pulling water out of a well and she's not poisoned with arsenic.
That is open science.
That's how it works.
So I wanna bring us back to the purpose of this podcast,
(47:49):
which is all about interruptions.
We've talked a bit about disruption.
We've talked about creating pathways,
parallel pathways.
I'm wondering how you think about interruption in this work.
Do you think disruption and interruption is the same thing? What is the role of interruption in innovation?
Interruptions for me as entrepreneur are pivots. Something isn't working right.
(48:40):
You recognize it's not working.
And you interrupt the pathway that you're currently on and you pivot to another pathway.
I'm looking at interruptions as an informed break in a pathway, if that makes sense.
I love this idea of pivot.
I really love that idea.
(49:01):
So it's not even necessarily a discontinuity.
It's a, I'm here.
I just need to shift my perspective so that I,
I see another way of doing something interesting.
It happens so frequently.
I've got a guy that I'm bringing on the team,
he's a fresh pair of eyes and he says something to me...
(49:23):
like I hadn't thought of that and immediately I see the value, and I stop that pathway and I move it a little bit.
I pivot a little bit and then I call up my tech team and I'm like,
guys,
we gotta pivot and now the tech team is like,
oh my God,
(49:43):
you know, we're already down this way to develop this.
And then it becomes a leadership and a management issue of how you interrupt that pathway and all the resources that are dedicated to the current pathway, to pivot to another pathway. That leadership for that interruption and pivot is what makes or breaks the day.
(50:06):
I'm really interested to see how this takes off.
I know there's already people using the platform.
You've had the open technologies component of it running for a couple years now and I'm really interested to see, from this broader concept of pivoting.
So much conversation has been happening for how many years about reputation and openness in the academy,
(50:35):
And how much effort that,
I mean,
you have an "ABD" PhD and myself a PhD. The time in our lives that we put into getting that PhD and the affiliated halo of that particular certificate.
And think about how can we make it possible for people who want to do research,
(50:59):
whether you have a PhD or not, to actually contribute, is really powerful.
And one of the things I did recently with a colleague of mine, Donna Ginther,
was to look at,
how many researchers are there in the world.
And when you look at this econometric model,
most of the people are defining researcher as somebody who has a PhD.
(51:21):
But then you look at how the UN defines researcher, and it's anyone who contributes to a research process,
two very,
very different definitions.
And what I like about what you're doing is you're enabling more of the UN intent for research.
And I think there's so many pieces in here that make people uncomfortable,
(51:46):
legacy people in the West,
It makes a lot of us uncomfortable and I think that's awesome.
And I think we need to try more things like this just because they make us uncomfortable.
They make us question the ways that we do things,
the why that we do things, and the way that we're doing them.
(52:07):
And to see if this more open science methodology can actually help us as a global community of humans solve our problems in a different and more effective way.
Perhaps.
So I'm gonna keep watching this space,
Jason,
do you wanna say a little bit more about what people should be looking at? The website? Something else?
(52:30):
This open science platform is called Therapoid.
You can just think of Android except it's the Therapoid.
And so right now,
there's complimentary science coins being provided to registrants on the platform.
And when we hit a certain threshold,
the smart contract will shut that off.
The other thing is I would say if you're not interested in the crypto,
(52:53):
if you think the crypto is something that you don't have anything to do with,
you're gonna earn it anyway,
by collaborating,
just push it off to the American Impact Capital Foundation and let them put it into socially conscious charities or socially conscious companies.
We really have built this infrastructure with a socially conscious mindset that says to the research community,
(53:17):
there's ways that you can benefit society beyond just your ideas.
Jason, thank you so much.
I learned a lot.
It's been fun for me to hear how Therapoid has evolved.
I hope other people find this as exciting as I do.
Thanks Laure.
(53:39):
Thank you for joining us.
For more about We Interrupt,
please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com
for show notes, links and other episodes.
Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
I really look forward to hearing from you.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(54:02):
I pay my respects to Elders, past and present
and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok’s "Melody with Interruptions", from The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project.
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