RE: Steem could transform scientific research culture - making research free, fun, legal and profitable!
I think our current model for scientific research has many problems and a lot of new models have been cogitated for quite some time (specially now with internet and blockchain technology) but it's definitely NOT an easy task (and I don't think there will ever be a one-model-fits-all solution).
You have some interesting ideas that can certainly evolve to something great. I believe any successful model for producing science should try to accomplish the following principles:
1. Free to read: science should belong to humanity and everybody (scientist or not) should have access to knowledge from anywhere in the globe free-of-charge. This is something that Open Access journals and recently Scihub have been trying to do.
2. Free to publish: scientists should not have to pay for publishing their discoveries, it's an unnecessary cost for them. There must be an economically sustainable way to store and maintain the content produced.
3. NO profits: scientific knowledge should not be a product. Scientists should NOT profit from their discoveries.
4. Quality: there must be a way to review scientific content produced. It must be economically sustainable without encouraging any kind of corruption (that is VERY hard).
5. Stop plagiarism and wrong content: a model must be able to discourage false discoveries and plagiarisms and also be able to alert people about it.
6. Credit: Authors and funding institutions must always be credited.
I agree with each and every point. The one barrier preventing its success is that we all happen to be human. The scientific method is the best tool to fight against ourselves but it cannot prevent our greed and desire for profit, for example, which breeds competition, which breeds snide attempts at bias and thus lower quality, and other forms of misinformation and the system collapses once more!
So indeed a more thorough, fool-proof system needs to be implemented, which would take a lot more pondering than what I've laid out here!
I am very impressed by the calibre of people posting scientific related posts on Steemit, and I think many of the models proposed all seem to suffer from the problems that you mentioned (or at least haven't addressed them adequately). I can't see that the blockchain system can be used to solve these issues because it is only a means of decentralizing content and its creation (like Wikipedia), but perhaps it could encourage scientists to be better communicators to the general public and also other scientists from around the world?
I believe blockchain technology could contribute specially on the storage and free aspects that I mentioned. But the bigger challenges are on ensuring quality and stopping plagiarism. If you look here on steemit itself it is a big concern and it should be even bigger on scientific work!