RE: Why Decentralization is Important for Academics
I am not agreeing too much with your text. Let me explain why.
No they are not. They are just as biased as any other group.
That's a very dangerous generalization. It is not true. Some scientists may be biased towards one direction, some others towards another, and many are actually only relying on facts. You have several groups working on similar topics and there is thus a competition. Competition is healthy. That's how new approaches are built.
Now, coming to the point of the scientific publications.
First, I would like to push forward the fact that journals are not belonging to any governments. Those are just private companies trying to make as much as money as possible... Universities all around the world are paying yearly fee so that their employees can access the information. For the rest of the world, it is a field dependent statement. Particle physics papers are mostly open access, for instance, as we pay for that.
Now let us discuss your proposal (to which I disagree mostly).
If we can develop something like Steemit why can't we develop a similar platform for distributing and voting on the reputable status of scientific papers?
Some are already thinking about make scientific result available to everybody. For instance, on the steemit blockhain, have you checked the pevo project? Now, outside steemit, have you heard about the arxiv platform?
Taking your proposal, who do you think could vote? Anyone? I don't think this is good. I would feel very uncomfortable to vote for something outside my field. I don't have any expertise to do so. Science must be reviewed by peers. The general audience can comment of course, but does Mr. or Ms. everybody have any knowledge to assess the quality of a scientific paper?
We develop a system that allows academics of all sorts to publish their data anonymously while still gaining reputation and financial compensation for it.
Why being anonymous? This makes no sense to me. If you are in academia, you want your peers to know what you are working on. Also, scientists are not looking for money for themselves. That is a wrong assumption from the start. They are however looking for funding to hire other people to help them on their research.
Scientific data will get censored just as much as copyright gets censored
This is again a very dangerous generalization. Open access data exists. Moreover, while I agree that data should be made available to the public after sometime, this should not be done blindly. Scientists may want to use their data and analyse it themselves first. They after all built the experiments and get this by their work. Then, after some time, they should however release the data (for reproducibility, etc...).