July 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM ET
Leveraging Goodhart’s Law to improve how we fund & publish science
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A summary of the webinar "Academia's Broken Incentives" featuring Patrick Joyce, COO and co-founder of ResearchHub
The academic world is facing a crisis of incentives that's undermining the very foundation of scientific research. In a recent webinar hosted by Atom Grants, Patrick Joyce from ResearchHub delivered a compelling presentation on how the current system of measuring and rewarding scientific achievement is actually encouraging behaviors that harm research quality and reproducibility.
Joyce opened with two striking personal anecdotes from his PhD experience at Boston University that illustrate the human toll of academia's broken incentive structure:
These stories aren't outliers—they represent the reality for countless researchers trapped in a system where financial survival depends on gaming metrics rather than producing quality science.
The evidence for academia's dysfunction is overwhelming:
The fundamental problem stems from what's known as Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Academia has long relied on bibliometrics—citation counts, journal impact factors, and publication frequency—to assess research quality. While these metrics made sense initially, they've now become targets that researchers optimize for, rather than meaningful measures of scientific value.
This has created a vicious cycle where:
The scientific community has developed several tools to combat these issues:
Pre-registration: Researchers publish their experimental plans before conducting studies, preventing post-hoc manipulation of methods and hypotheses.
Registered Reports: Journals accept studies based on experimental design quality rather than results, guaranteeing publication regardless of outcomes.
Prediction Markets: Platforms like DARPA's replication markets allow people to bet on whether studies will replicate, using crowd wisdom to identify questionable research.
Funder Mandates: Organizations like the Gates Foundation and NIH now require open access publication and data sharing.
While these tools show promise, they haven't fundamentally altered the underlying incentive structure that drives problematic behaviors.
Joyce's team at ResearchHub is taking a different approach, leveraging blockchain technology to create new financial incentives for quality research. Their platform operates on three key principles:
Scientific literature is stored across a decentralized network rather than profit-driven journal servers, preventing the loss of less popular papers and ensuring permanent access.
Token holders have governance rights over how the platform operates, giving control to the scientific community rather than corporate boards with misaligned incentives.
Instead of trying to measure quality objectively, ResearchHub predefines what constitutes good scientific practice and rewards those behaviors directly.
The platform functions as an academic social media network where researchers:
Key Features:
ResearchHub's approach is showing significant traction:
Joyce's presentation highlighted a crucial insight: rather than fighting Goodhart's Law, we should accept that any quality metric will eventually be gamed and instead focus on creating incentives for the behaviors we actually want to see.
By rewarding reproducible methodology, open peer review, and collaborative research directly through cryptocurrency incentives, ResearchHub aims to realign academic incentives with scientific values. While still early in development, their approach offers a promising alternative to the current system's perverse incentives.
This webinar underscores several critical points for researchers, funders, and institutions:
Patrick Joyce's presentation painted a sobering picture of academia's current state while offering hope through innovative solutions. As he noted, even Peter Higgs—whose groundbreaking work led to the discovery of the Higgs boson—admitted he "wouldn't get an academic job" in today's hypercompetitive environment focused on productivity over profundity.
The time has come for the research community to seriously consider alternatives to the current system. Platforms like ResearchHub represent an important experiment in using technology to realign incentives with scientific values. Whether blockchain-based solutions will ultimately succeed remains to be seen, but the urgent need for change is undeniable.
For researchers tired of the publish-or-perish culture, funders frustrated with wasted resources, and institutions seeking to support meaningful scientific progress, the message is clear: we must move beyond measuring science to actively incentivizing the behaviors that create reliable, reproducible, and impactful research.
The full webinar recording and additional resources are available through Atom Grants' webinar series. ResearchHub can be found at researchhub.com, and Patrick Joyce can be reached on Twitter @joysticks.