Empowering Scholars to work beyond the confines of “The Institution”.

Overview

Higher-ed is being disrupted in a number of important ways. Development of online courses geared to skill training is accelerating rapidly - Google’s entrance to this space with Coursera indicates strong likelihood of further development. The Google UX certification course alone has generated tens of thousands of individual users. Growing discourse over the undesirability of student loans + student dissatisfaction with a typical university experience will push these developments further. In short, the Academy is on the precipice.

Our intervention is geared on the production side of academic work - namely the infrastructure of faculty research and publication. Our service is to return the benefits of production to the researcher - empowering them to monetize their work and distribute it in the way they envision. We cut out the middle-person, the journal, to allow true ownership of academic work.

Additionally, we see NFTs as a chance to reconsider academic influence and reach. We are in search of the next phase of NFT meaning - in the rise of Web3, there are chances to reconsider an NFT not just as a influence commodity for art, but as the decentralized medium for the distribution and collaboration of all kinds of human creation. We believe establishing academic work as an NFT pushes the entire paradigm forward, it seeks a way to bring academic knowledge building in to the future.

DOWN WITH THE JOURNAL!

We wish to usher in the decimation of the academic journal. Reasons why:

  1. They are definitionally exploitative. Why should they be able to make money on work they didn’t produce? They offer nothing but “reach”. Their power is institutional, not earned.
  2. They are gatekeepers of knowledge. They are anti-democratic. First, their paywall is classist - only certain institutions have the funds to subscribe. Second, there are long histories of bias against women + minorities in publication history.
  3. Their claims to legitimacy are wrong. Studies prove the peer-review process is BROKEN. It is opaque, faulty, and ineffective.
  4. We reprogram the tenure line - if we can reach a critical mass, we can claim to be as good as any other journal for tenure consideration purposes. However, our model destabilizes that entire configuration, what that means for the future is unclear.

What We Are

The Digital Printing Press

We help academics mint their work into NFTs. Our mission with this product is multi-faceted. First, we are evangelists for the development of the NFT infrastructure. Our mission is to empower academics with the knowledge they need to find empowerment by owning their own work.