Last Updated on: 25th February 2025, 11:58 am
A London-based startup has launched a pioneering solution designed to safeguard intellectual property in academia and business.
With many cases of research misconduct remaining unresolved each year, a deep tech startup in London is introducing an innovative tool to protect scholarly and corporate research. Research Integrity Chain (RICH) is the first scientific blockchain application specifically developed to secure and monetise intellectual property, addressing a major issue in academic integrity.
According to recent figures from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General and the Office of Research Integrity, between 2020 and 2024, an average of 280 cases of research misconduct were recorded annually. Of these, approximately 87 cases were concluded each year.
A study by Arthur M. Michalek estimates that institutions typically incur costs of around $525,000 per investigation. Based on this figure, the 433 investigations reported as closed by ORI and NSF over the past five years would amount to an annual institutional expenditure of roughly $45 million on research misconduct cases.
When considering losses across all sectors, the financial impact is substantial. Based on estimates derived from NSF and other sources, research misconduct in the US could result in losses of up to $29.0 billion by 2025. This figure includes losses from fabrication, plagiarism, and data manipulation, representing approximately 3% in direct and 7% in indirect losses from the total $1 trillion research market.
Dmytro Shestakov, CEO and co-founder of RICH, says “We have a clear answer to this challenge. We prevent forgery and ensure integrity of researchers’ IP rights for every single piece of data they work with”. “The data is further tokenized and can be proved by immutable, traceable and verifiable research records.”
“Think of it as a researcher’s tool where everyone can view what’s written, but no one can remove or change earlier entries without everyone knowing or agreeing on,” adds Dr. Balaji Panchapakesan, Fulbright Research Scholar, Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, Sloan Fellow in Leadership and Strategy at London Business School, Faculty Research Achievement Award winner at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Advising and Mentoring Award winner at University of Louisville, and National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner.
The next iteration of the RICH application will integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. “We have launched and right now providing research copyright protection to individual researchers and research teams” Dmytro emphasizes. “In another word, we offer an additional layer of security without disrupting established processes for the price of 2 cups of coffee and that’s just the beginning”.
RICH’s technical advantage lies in its application of blockchain technology to create what is essentially an immutable digital ledger for research. The platform tokenizes research data and creates verifiable timestamps for each step of the research process, from initial hypothesis to final publication. Their answer attends to four important research community needs:
1. Protecting unpublished intellectual property
2. Secure data authenticity verification
3. Safe collaboration in research
4. Prospect for research monetization
The timing couldn’t be more crucial. Against the backdrop of problems associated with research misconduct, there is a growing problem with the untraceable use of AI in critical areas of our life such as medicine, politics, elections, etc. While the unchecked use of AI in medicine is a huge problem of unknown magnitude whose consequences we have yet to explore, the processes involved in the cognitive-behavioural manipulation of people using major internet platforms and social media are already having obvious disastrous consequences.
In a recent letter, European affairs ministers want the European Commission to use its powers under the Digital Services Act to protect the integrity of European elections from foreign interference and manipulation of information. In their pledge, they cite growing threats of destructive foreign interference in elections by Russia and China, which threaten their stability and sovereignty.
The described phenomena need to be regulated by the EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence, The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act and should formally ensure transparency and traceability of the described processes.
The RICH provides a relevant but technical ready-to-use solution for academic and any other institutions struggling with research integrity problems. The platform tackles the “perimeter problem” — the difficulty of safeguarding research at the pre-publication stage when information must be distributed but its usage cannot be regulated. What’s more, RICH gives to their users the necessary transparency at every stage with the ability to trace the lifecycle of content from its creation to official release, protecting intellectual property rights.
“RICH enables something previously impossible in academia – proving research authenticity and ownership in real-time,” said Balaji. “This could fundamentally change how researchers protect their work.”
With research showing that questionable research practices affect between 10% and 50% of researchers, RICH’s launch marks a significant step forward in protecting scholarly integrity in the digital age.
For a free trial visit: https://researchintegritychain.com/
