Metascience and Decentralized Science

News

• Science Works launches by Research Professional News. Ben Johnson and Laura Ryan's independent UK R&D policy studio — focused on institutional diversity, AI and science, and British scientific renewal — goes public. June 2026.
• Radial supports The Deliverome Project with $5M seed funding by Becky Pferdehirt. Astera Institute's life sciences arm funds a nonprofit building an open-source atlas of cell surface proteins to unlock targeted drug delivery. May 27, 2026.
• NSF announces $1.5B NSF X-Labs initiative to pursue generational breakthrough science efforts by NSF. May 14, 2026.
• Open Source for Science Fund Launches to Power AI-Driven Discovery by Renaissance Philanthropy. $20M fund for open source software infrastructure in life sciences and AI research. May 4, 2026.
• Meeting the moment: how scientific philanthropies are expanding their reach by Nature. April 22, 2026.
• Why I'm joining Astera to lead Radial by Becky Pferdehirt. March 11, 2026.
• Decentralized Science Project Aubrai Launches on Base to Tackle Science Funding's 'Valley of Death' by CoinDesk. August 25, 2025.
• VitaDAO Launches First IPT Offering VITA-FAST With 1700 Oversubscription by Ainvest. August 24, 2025.
• Pfizer Ventures' Michael Baran joins Sapien Capital's DeSci push by Longevity.Technology. August 13, 2025.
• From Lab Notes to Ledgers: DeSci's July Momentum by AuraSci. July 18, 2025.
• Britain's moonshot factory has a moment of opportunity by John Thornhill. June 19, 2025.
• A New Vision for Science Diplomacy: Q&A With Cassidy Sugimoto by Georgia Tech News. June 23, 2025.
• Former MIT researchers advance a new model for innovation by Zach Winn. June 6, 2025.
• Demonstrating end-to-end scientific discovery with Robin: a multi-agent system by FutureHouse. May 20, 2025.
• ValleyDAO x JuniperVC Partnership. May 19, 2025.
• BGA x AuraSci x Hetu Protocol Launch $100K Joint Fund for DeSci Innovation. May 15, 2025.
• Decentralized Science is Powering Accelerated Innovation: Here's How by Caleb Simmons. May 13, 2025.
• FutureHouse Platform: Superintelligent AI Agents for Scientific Discovery. May 1, 2025.
• Women in DeSci by DeSciWorld. April 23, 2025.
• DeSci: Boom or Bust? by Chrissa McFarlane. March 31, 2025.
• DeSci Labs: Making Scientific Research Transparent, Accessible, and Trustworthy by Rohaan Khan. March 18, 2025.
• Galaxis Lands $5M – Yahoo Finance. March 9, 2025.
• Sei Foundation launches $65 million DeSci venture fund 'Sapien Capital' by Yogita Khatri. January 29, 2025.
• Rise of metascience: Turning science on itself by Luke Fehily. October 17, 2024.
• Meet our Activation Partners: driving progress through science entrepreneurship by ARIA. October 9, 2024.
• Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again by Matt Reynolds. October 2, 2024.
• a16z begins investing in DeSci with AminoChain, leads $5M seed round by Vince Dioquino. September 27, 2024.
• The UK's $1-billion bet to create technologies that change the world by Nisha Gaind. September 18, 2024.
• The UK launched a metascience unit. Will other countries follow suit? by Dalmeet Singh Chawla. August 7, 2024.
• Decentralized science is modernizing outdated systems by Patrick Joyce. June 16, 2024.
• The State of DeSci: An Ecosystem Overview by Jonathan Heppner. June 13, 2024.
• Tom Kalil's Renaissance Philanthropy Recruits Wealthy Science Funders by Sean Captain. May 28, 2024.
• NSF partners with the Institute for Progress to test new mechanisms for funding research and innovation. September 28, 2023.

Podcasts, Newsletters & Conferences

Podcasts

• Accelerate Science Now
• Can't Be Done by Adam Draper
• Proof of DeSci by ValleyDAO
• Idea Machines Podcast by Benjamin Reinhardt
• UltraRare — "A podcast at the intersection of science and web3."
• The DeSci Podcast by Molecule
• Center for Open Science YouTube channel
• Macroscience by Tim Hwang
• The Foresight Institute Podcast
• DeSci Pilled

Newsletters & Publications

• DeSci Weekly
• Speculative Technologies' newsletter
• FreakTakes by Eric Gilliam of Good Science Project
• Molecule newsletter
• Macroscience by Tim Hwang
• Works in Progress
• Stripe Press

Conferences

• Bottlenecks, San Francisco, September 6, 2024
• Progress Conference 2024: Toward Abundant Futures, Berkeley, October 18–19, 2024
• Metascience, London, June 30 – July 2, 2025
• DeSci Berlin, Berlin, May 23–24, 2024

Organizations

Think Tanks

Institutes & DARPA-like Organizations

Funders

Focused Research Organizations

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

Bio

Publishing

Communities

Research Evaluation Reform

Data

Ecosystem

Tools, Methods, Norms, Heuristics, Practices, Ideas, Visions

Field Building

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Scientific Field Creation. Playbook for philanthropists and scientists on catalysing emerging fields through key actor investment, connective infrastructure, and risk-tolerant funding.
• Marius Oosthuizen — The Systems Transformation Architect: A Role for the Century Ahead. On the emerging role of leaders who work across institutions, sectors, disciplines, and futures to facilitate systemic change. May 20, 2026.
• David Lang — Where are the field builders?. December 28, 2024.
• Homeworld Collective — Fall 2024 Preview: Experiments in fieldbuilding with a focus on greenhouse gas removal. October 9, 2024.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Research Leaders' Playbook. April 4, 2024.
• Bridgespan Group — Field Building for Population-Level Change. March 27, 2020.
• Edward S. Boyden & Adam Marblestone — Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience. May 8, 2019.
• Cassie Robinson — Building the field?. June 15, 2018.

Institutional Design

• Playbook: Designing new institutions and renewing existing ones by TIAL. March 25, 2025.

Governance

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Policy Entrepreneurship. Playbook on identifying policy levers, building coalitions, and leveraging strategic timing to influence government decision-making.
• Foundation ownership and sustainability by David Schröder and Steen Thomsen. February 11, 2025.

Funding Mechanisms

Research Funding

• Institute for Progress & Market Shaping Accelerator — The Atlas of Innovation. Interactive toolkit of frontier R&D funding mechanisms for philanthropists and policymakers. Led by Caleb Watney & Matthew Esche. 2026.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — Thesis-Driven Philanthropic Funds. Playbook on deploying capital through expert fund directors who manage grant portfolios aligned around a specific thesis.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — Catalytic Capital. Playbook on deploying investment tools — concessional debt, guarantees, equity — to fill financing gaps and mobilise larger flows of public and private capital beyond what grant-making alone can achieve.
• Steve Olson — Experimental Approaches to Improving Research Funding Programs. March 7, 2024.

Quadratic Funding

• Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig & Glen Weyl — A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods. September 18, 2018.
• wtfisqf by Gitcoin.

Fund People, Not Projects

• Stuart Buck — What is Good Science?. Foresight Institute Podcast. May 30, 2024.
• John P. A. Ioannidis — Fund people not projects. September 28, 2011.
• José Luis Ricón — Fund People, not projects. December 2020 – February 2021.

Fund Organizations, Not Projects

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Mid-Scale Science. Playbook on structuring focused investments of tens of millions of dollars to accelerate scientific discovery across AI, biotech, and materials science.
• Caleb Watney — Launching X-Labs for Transformative Science Funding. May 2025.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Fund Organizations, Not Projects. January 2022.

Advance Market Commitment & Market Shaping

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Market Shaping. Playbook on using AMCs, prizes, and other instruments to incentivise innovation where commercial markets fail.
• Nan Ransohoff — How to start an advance market commitment. May 31, 2024.
• Jake Taylor & Alan Ho — Using Advance Market Commitments for Public Purpose Technology Development. June 2021.

Prizes

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Prize Competitions. Playbook on designing prizes to attract diverse innovators to clearly-defined problems.
• Santi Ruiz — How to Use Challenge Prizes. Statecraft. December 13, 2023.
• Michael Kremer & Heidi Williams — Incentivizing Innovation: Adding to the Toolkit. Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 10. 2010.

Coordinated Research Programs

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Coordinated Research Programs. Playbook for funders on sourcing leadership, managing distributed teams, and executing CRPs.
• Daniel P. Gross & Maria P. Roche — Coordinated R&D Programs and the Creation of New Industries. HBS Working Paper. October 2024.

Intramural Science

• Jordi Cabana — Metascience Is Ignoring the National Labs. Macroscience. May 18, 2026.

Commitments

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Commitments. Playbook on using structured stakeholder pledges to drive collective action on major challenges without legislation or market incentives.

AI Tools for Science

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Common Task Method. Playbook on uniting research communities around standardised datasets and clear metrics to accelerate AI applications in chemistry, materials science, climate, and beyond.
• Elicit — AI research assistant for literature review, data extraction, and synthesis.
• Consensus — AI-powered search engine for scientific papers.
• Semantic Scholar — Free AI-powered research tool built by the Allen Institute for AI.
• Connected Papers — Visual tool for finding and exploring papers relevant to your field.
• ResearchRabbit — Paper discovery and literature mapping.
• Scite — Smart citation analysis showing how papers have been cited in context.
• Litmaps — Interactive literature maps for tracking research fields over time.
• OpenAlex — Fully open catalog of the global research system: papers, authors, institutions, topics.
• PaperQA by FutureHouse — Open-source LLM pipeline for question-answering over scientific literature.
• Claude as a chemist — Anthropic's work on training Claude to interpret NMR spectra, match specialised software on peak prediction, and deduce molecular structures from experimental data alone.
• Evidentia — Verifies scientific claims against 200M papers, 20M patents, 4M PhD theses, and 500K clinical trials; surfaces relevant unpublished data by connecting researchers with field experts. By Alvin Djajadikerta (Evidentia Labs; ex-Cambridge neuroscientist).
• Otto-sr — AI agent for building systematic reviews; automates literature search, screening, and synthesis.
• Ai2 ScholarQA — Allen Institute for AI's scholarly question-answering system, grounded in citations across millions of papers. 2024.
• OpenEval — Extracts atomic claims from papers with LLM evaluation; 1.96M claims from 16,000+ papers, 81% agreement with human review. 2026.
• Evidence.guide — API extracting hypotheses and test statistics from behavioural science papers. By Paul Litvak (Robyn Dawes Institute).
• OpenAI — PaperBench. Benchmark for evaluating AI agents on replicating machine learning research from scratch. 2025.

Technology Roadmaps, Tech Trees & Agenda Setting

• Renaissance Philanthropy — Target Product Profiles. Playbook on defining the characteristics innovations must meet to address unmet needs — used to orient R&D toward real-world impact.
• Ed Boyden, Nina Khera & Claire Wang — The Tiling Tree Method, Part 2: Common Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them
• Ed Boyden, Nina Khera, Adam Marblestone & Claire Wang — The Tiling Tree Method: How to think of every way of solving a problem. September 21, 2025.
• Fundamental Development Gap Map v1.0 by Convergent Research. Ongoing.
• Bio.ai Roadmap. 2025.
• BMFTR — High-Tech Agenda Germany. Germany's national strategy for technological leadership, developed through 26 stakeholder dialogues across six priority technology areas. Includes technology roadmaps. Ongoing.
• U.S. Department of Energy — Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap: Build, Innovate, Grow. National strategy for commercialising fusion power, developed with 600+ researchers and industry stakeholders; identifies critical science and technology gaps and milestones toward grid-scale fusion by the mid-2030s. October 2025.
• Adam Marblestone — A Beginner's Guide to Scientific Roadmapping. March 21, 2025.
• Solid-state Far-UVC Roadmapping Workshop Report. 2024.
• Renaissance Philanthropy: Agenda Setting is Underrated. December 2024.
• Towards ubiquitous metagenomic sequencing: a technology roadmap. 2024.
• Supersonic Electric Flight. 2023.
• Willy Chertman's Fertility Whitepaper. 2023.
• Macromodular Additive Manufacturing by Chris Wintersinger for Speculative Technologies. September 5, 2023.
• Nanomodular Electronics by Michael Filler & Ben Reinhardt for Speculative Technologies. February 15, 2023.
• Near-term Climate Risks and Sunlight Reflection Modification. 2022.
• Transformative Opportunities for Single-Cell Proteomics. 2022.
• Opportunities in Pulsed Magnetic Fusion Energy. 2022.
• Mission-driven green research and innovation partnerships. 2021.
• Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification. 2021.
• Superconducting Optoelectronic Neurons V: Networks and Scaling. 2021.
• Physical Principles for Scalable Neural Recording. 2013.
• International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS). Ongoing.
• IDA's Science and Technology Policy Institute. Ongoing.
• JASON Studies (non-classified reports). Ongoing.
• Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) Roadmaps. Ongoing.
• Revolution Stalled (Neuroscience Roadmap). 2012.
• Nuclear Fission Power for 21st Century Needs. 2008.
• Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap. 2007.
• The Foresight Institute's work on Tech Trees. Ongoing.

Vision Papers

See Michael Nielsen's Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science. May 28, 2022.

• ReflexDAO — ReflexDAO: Digital Healthcare to Prevent Chronic Disease. May 15, 2025.
• Curetopia — Vision Paper. February 6, 2025.
• Asterisk DAO — The Non-Productive Health Research Gap. August 27, 2024.
• Samuel G. Rodrigues & Adam H. Marblestone — Focused Research Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine. September 2020.
• Michael Stebbins & Geoffrey Ling — Creating The Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA). April 19, 2020.
• A. Yu. Kitaev — Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons. May 20, 2002.
• John Archibald Wheeler — Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links. 1989.
• Alan Kay — A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. 1972.
• Alexander Rich — On the Problems of Evolution and Biochemical Information Transfer. 1962.
• A. M. Turing — On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Entscheidungsproblem. 1936.

Research Evaluation

• DORA — San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Landmark declaration recommending against use of journal-based metrics such as the Impact Factor in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. 2012; 26,000+ signatories across 171 countries as of 2025.
• DORA — Coordinated Reform in Research Assessment and Publishing. On aligning reforms across evaluation and publishing systems. March 2026.
• CoARA & DORA — Shared Principles, Shared Progress. Joint statement on global responsible research assessment culture, following the EU Presidency High-Level Conference in Copenhagen. December 2025.
• Ola Thomson, Gemma Derrick et al. — Improving How Non-Traditionally Submitted Research Outputs Are Evaluated in the REF. University of Bristol Policy Briefing. May 2026.
• DARPA — SCORE (Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence). Program pairing human coding of psychology papers with prediction market forecasts to assess replication likelihood; foundational infrastructure for scalable replication.
• Retraction Watch — Tracks retracted papers across all journals; integrated with Crossref since October 2023. Run by the Center for Scientific Integrity.
• Statcheck — Automatically detects statistical inconsistencies in psychology papers by recalculating reported test statistics from degrees of freedom and p-values.
• Regcheck — Compares preregistered analysis plans against published results to flag deviations; automated preregistration auditing.

Output

• Astera Open Science Policy.

AI Peer Review

• Refine.ink — AI peer review identifying methodological weaknesses before submission.
• Coarse — Open-source AI tool for methodological review; alternative to proprietary peer review systems.
• Reviewer3 — AI peer review platform simulating expert reviewer feedback.
• ReviewerZero.ai — AI peer review system.
• Q.E.D. Science — AI peer review providing qualitative methodological feedback.

Intellectual Property

• Molecule — Tokenized IPs — documentation covering IP-NFTs, IP Tokens (IPTs), revenue models, legal framework, and the full IP lifecycle from research creation to secondary market trading.
• Molecule — IP-NFTs: A Technical Description — a hybrid legal-smart contract structure for on-chain registration and management of IP and R&D data rights.
• Molecule — Introducing the IP-NFT V2 — extends the original structure with new funding mechanisms for the DeSci ecosystem.
• Molecule — Molecule Protocol V2: Bridging DeSci into Real-World Assets — merges IP-NFTs with traditional corporate structures to create IP RWAs.