ArticlePDF Available

Publish-and-Flourish: Using Blockchain Platform to Enable Cooperative Scholarly Communication

Authors:
  • Neutrino8, Inc.

Abstract and Figures

Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish-or-perish culture that propels non-cooperative behavior in the sense of strategic games played by researchers. Here we introduce and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements cryptoeconomic incentives that promote cooperative user behavior. The key to achieve cooperation in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform today’s static research paper into a modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process. We introduce and discuss the implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain.
Content may be subject to copyright.
publications
Article
Publish-and-Flourish: Using Blockchain Platform to
Enable Cooperative Scholarly Communication
Emilija Stojmenova Duh 1,2, Andrej Duh 1, Uroš Droftina 1, Tim Kos 1,3, Urban Duh 1,
Tanja Simoniˇc Korošak 4and Dean Korošak 5,6,*
1Infinitcodex, Ltd., Maribor SI-2000, Slovenia; Emilija.Stojmenova@ltfe.org (E.S.D.);
andrej.duh@infinitcodex.com (A.D.); u.droftina@gmail.com (U.D.);
tim.kos@infinitcodex.com (T.K.); urban.duh@infinitcodex.com (U.D.)
2Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana SI-1000, Slovenia
3Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics, Ljubljana SI-1000, Slovenia
4TSK Studio, Maribor SI-2000, Slovenia; simonic.tanja@gmail.com
5Institute for Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, Maribor SI-2000, Slovenia
6Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor,
Maribor SI-2000, Slovenia
*Correspondence: dean.korosak@um.si; Tel.: +386-2-2294-323
Received: 17 November 2018; Accepted: 24 April 2019; Published: 5 May 2019


Abstract:
Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish-or-perish culture that propels
non-cooperative behavior in the sense of strategic games played by researchers. Here we introduce
and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design
of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements
cryptoeconomic incentives that promote cooperative user behavior. The key to achieve cooperation
in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform today’s static research paper into a
modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process. We introduce and discuss the
implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain.
Keywords:
scholarly communication; open science; blockchain; decentralisation; smart contract;
continuous peer review; publish-and-flourish
1. Introduction
The Internet and social media in particular are the enablers of media convergence, a phenomenon
characterized by flow of content and migration of users, linking together content, communication
and computation [
1
,
2
]. However, besides positive effects of convergence such as the rise of collective
processes of information consumption and consumer-generated media, we are recently witnessing
the emergence of fast traveling fake news influencing collective human decisions [
3
,
4
], helped
also by spreading of automated content generation [
5
]. Even reporting on results of scientific
discoveries in traditional academic journals is not immune to overhyped or even fake claims that cause
irreproducibility and distrust [6].
At first, fast migration and automation of content, and trust seem orthogonal to each other.
However, the application of blockchain technologies [
7
] hold a promise to profoundly change and
decentralize scholarly communication [
8
,
9
], bringing together spreadability, migration credibility
and trust, based on open science principles [
10
]. Blockchains, in short, are digital ledgers of
cryptographically validated transactions distributed in a network of nodes that validate each new
block of transactions through some consensus mechanism before that block is immutably appended
to the ledger [
11
14
]. Blockchains are architecturally and politically decentralized: there is no single
point of failure in the infrastructure and there is no single governing body of a blockchain. All nodes in
Publications 2019,7, 33; doi:10.3390/publications7020033 www.mdpi.com/journal/publications
Publications 2019,7, 33 2 of 15
the blockchain network must, however, with a consensus agree on one state of a blockchain, therefore
making blockchain a logically centralized system [12].
Like blockchain, science is architecturally (research infrastructures do not have a single point of
failure) and politically (research is not governed by a single scientific authority) decentralized [
15
].
Science is, however, logically centralized (the scientific community must agree on one state—scientific
truth) through “a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only
social process that does” [
16
]. In science, this consensus is reached through scholarly communication.
Though “The goal of science, moreover, is to achieve the maximum degree of consensuality” [
17
],
we see the consensus in science as a temporal, dynamic process that also influences peer review
and its outcomes [
18
]. There are variations in the level of consensus and different approaches to
confirmation [
19
] and reproducibility [
20
] across scientific disciplines. We find the broadly shared
consensus at the core knowledge, while at the research frontier [
21
] there may simultaneously exist
several (many) research consensuses.
Building of a truly decentralized and trusted scholarly communication model “prompts the
articulation of the functions that academic publishing provides and how, if these are still required, they
might be provided in decentralized models” [14].
Academic publishing (in print and electronic form) is a prevailing medium of scholarly
communication that in the current form suffers from inefficiencies including slow, incomplete,
inaccurate and unmodifiable communication [22].
Today, there exist three high-level models of academic publishing: paywalled (peer reviewed,
free or fee for authors, readers pay to access the papers), open access (peer reviewed, fee for
authors to publish, free access to published papers), and preprint repository (self-archiving or
centralized archives of preprints, no fees, but no peer-review either). Scholarly publishers provide,
from an economic point of view, rivalrous or non-rivalrous goods (research papers in the form of
physical or digital texts) that can be excludable or non-excludable (behind paywall or free to access).
However, a more careful analysis shows that a journal, as an instance of scholarly communication,
is better understood as a knowledge club [
23
] where members of the community both produce and
consume knowledge under voluntary and non-anonymously crowded participation, with exclusive
access [
23
]. If scholarly publishing “works best as a club good” [
23
] and is “better understood
as a social production technology” [
24
] then any innovative technological solution to scholarly
communication problems must primarily focus on providing support for communities and their
governance structure. Blockchain technologies are promising in this respect since at the core they are
peer-to-peer networks governed by consensus mechanisms. Yet, despite technological advances in
communication and publishing technologies that can provide efficient infrastructure governed by
researchers [
25
], the journal structure of scholarly communication is still prevalent. We agree that
“scholarly publishers need to shift their attention from products to communities; from journals to
knowledge clubs” [24].
Consolidation of the academic publishing industry resulted in a market with limited competition
and with ever increasing profits for a few large players [
26
28
]. Large profits are possible because
the marginal costs of electronic publishing have no lower boundary (practically zero), and because
paywalled or open access academic publishing stands on non-compensated work of researchers in
three-fold roles: authors, reviewers and editors. Academic publishing was described as a coordination
game (Bergstrom 2001) where users (authors, reviewers and editors) coordinate at journals and are
stuck in one of the equilibria where they “continue to pay huge rents to owners of commercial
journals” [29].
Large publishing companies have positioned themselves as centralized authorities, as gatekeepers
of the quality of published research and providers of reputation for authors whose academic careers
in turn depend on the products these same publishers provide. Academic life is immersed in
publish-or-perish culture, the growing pressure on researchers to keep rapidly publishing scholarly
content to survive in academia, resulting in fast-growing volume of published papers [
30
,
31
].
Publications 2019,7, 33 3 of 15
Such accelerated growth of published scholarly content slows down the progress in large scientific
fields [
32
] and affects science trustworthiness when the quantity of published work is used as dominant
metric for evaluation of researchers [
33
]. Trustworthiness in science is further eroded by arrival of
predatory journals [
34
] the existence of which “is only the most pathetic facet of a much deeper cultural
problem within science—a form of comic relief on the backdrop of a tragedy, which we should all take
as a reminder of how far from our goals we have strayed” [35].
At the core of scholarly communication is peer review, a recommendation process underlying
publication decisions that should guard the trust and guarantee high quality of published work.
However, under publish-or-perish culture, peer review became flawed, non-transparent, inconsistent
and biased [
36
38
]. The current situation in the academic publishing market where the scientific
journals operate without the transparency of peer review process [
39
41
] is harmful to scientific
progress [
42
44
], limits the participation of researchers from developing economies, is biased against
young researchers, and creates wrong incentives for authors [4548].
Are there ways out of the current scholarly communication paradigm? In terms of a coordination
game, can the community of researchers move from the current publish-or-perish equilibrium into
publish-and-flourish equilibrium?
Suggestions to change the current paradigm include morphing the self-archiving preprint
repositories into the arXivs of the future [
49
], using disruptive technologies such as peer-to-peer
applications changing distributions of financial resources between researchers and institutions [
50
],
and decentralized blockchain solutions [
8
,
9
,
14
,
51
] by creating platforms for open science [
10
] on
the blockchain.
Following the analysis of inefficiencies of today’s scholarly communication, a six-stage process
approach of modifying the current system into an open science platform was proposed [
22
] with the
implementation of open, continuous peer review as the last stage of the transformation process. Key to
the shift from publish-and-perish to publish-and-flourish academic culture is a profound change in
incentives for authors: “... the scientist’s ultimate objective is no longer to get published, because
everything is published. The objective is to influence future ideas and investigations, that is, what
should be the key incentive in the first place” [22].
Here, we suggest that for such a shift a radical change of the concept of research paper itself is
necessary—a change from unmodifiable to modifiable published scholarly content that by definition
demands open and continuous review process. We show that distributed ledger technology (i.e.,
blockchain technology) based platform solution tailored to support open scholarly communication
provides users (teachers, researchers, students) with mechanisms for building trust and reputation,
protects privacy and operates with transparency and access through a decentralized peer-to-peer
network. In particular, we propose a design for a platform that supports the implementation of
encoding scholarly content into smart contracts—a code that runs on a blockchain. Such encoding
allows the content to function as a computable autonomous entity that can interact with other
computable autonomous entities on a blockchain and with human users on the platform.
2. Theoretical Motivations
An interesting set of experiments [
52
] explored how blockchain technology as a new medium
could change storytelling by considering stories as currency—in this case as cryptocurrency, and
noticed that both competitive and cooperative modes of user actions are induced by the distributed
organisation of the blockchain. This opens up an intriguing possibility to explore the role of
blockchain technology in strategic games [
53
] and in resolving social dilemmas occurring in scholarly
communication set as game theoretical problems [5459].
Let us consider two core processes in scholarly communication: publishing (making information
available to public) and peer reviewing (recommendation process to publish/reject a paper) as games
played by rational agents acting in both roles: as authors and as reviewers.
Publications 2019,7, 33 4 of 15
The quality of published works and therefore trustworthiness in science critically depends on the
social norms of peer reviewing process [
56
]. Diligent, responsible and honest peer reviews constitute a
valuable resource of the scientific community—the scientific commons [
60
]. Under publish-or-perish
pressure a researcher will prioritise her/his own publication output over providing quality reviews of
other researchers’ work, getting the benefit
B>
0 (obtaining a review from the commons) without the
effort (cost)
e>
0 (contributing reviews to the commons). Each researcher can then play a strategy
C
(cooperate), contributing reviews with the pay-off
Be
or can play a strategy
D
(defect) with the
pay-off
B
if enough other researchers (for instance more than
N
) in the community cooperate. If there
are not enough cooperators in the community, the pay-off of a cooperator is
e
, and the pay-off of a
defector 0. The game structure is given in Table 1.
Table 1. The tragedy of the commons game structure.
#C>N#C<N
C B ee
D B 0
With the pay-off structure:
B>Be>e>
0, a rational, strategic choice is to play
D
with the
pay-off 0, thus exhausting the commons and causing “the tragedy of the commons” [
61
,
62
] in this case
the scientific commons.
Social mechanisms like indirect reciprocity [
63
] built on reputation of community members
were shown to be able to resolve the commons dilemma, sustain cooperation (and thus preserve the
commons) in certain repeated games and help overcome the “tragedy of the commons” [
64
]. More
generally, for a successful resolution of social dilemma the interventions in strategies should focus on
four key parts: information, identity, institutions and incentives [65].
The key principles of blockchain technology as enabler of decentralized scholarly communication
are perfectly aligned with these foci of interventions and their core motives: understanding, belonging,
trusting and self-enhancing [
65
]. Blockchain, a distributed immutable database with equal and
full transparency of information to all users without centralized authority, reduces uncertainty and
increases understanding. Transactions based on pseudonymous peer-to-peer communication, with a
choice for a user to opt for proof of identity to others, induces a strong sense of community with
mutual trust between communicating parties in contrast to groups with completely anonymous
communication where it is hard to imagine that consistent and reliable reputation systems might
emerge. The questions of anonymity, pseudonimity or disclosed identity in blockchain technologies
are currently important legal and regulatory issues related to General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) [66].
Integrity of the blockchain is protected with algorithms and rules defining consensus mechanisms
that create decentralized trust and provide social and (crypto)economic incentives to reward honest
work (proof-of-X) and increase reputation of users. Blockchain technologies implement on one hand
institutions via coding rules and constraints [
67
], while on the other they still need institutional
governance that must rely on design principles similar to commons [
68
] such as credible commitment
and mutual monitoring [
69
]. This is especially true here, in our case of I8X platform (described
in the next section), where the blockchain technology is of federated or consortium type (the
blockchain is governed by the consortium of institutions) so that “the ultimate impact of blockchain
in systems of governance and regulation will be felt, not just due its innate characteristics, but its
implementation” [70].
The ability of the blockchain—“the trust machine” [
71
]—to act as a generator of decentralized
trust without any central authority is in our view key to promote cooperation between users, to serve
as a indirect reciprocity enabler and reputation builder with perfect memory accessible to anyone.
Cooperation is possible even in games with defection (cheating) as the dominant strategy in community
of users which frequently interact such as prisoner’s dilemma [
53
,
62
,
72
]. Discounting future payment
Publications 2019,7, 33 5 of 15
in repeated games [
53
] can maintain cooperation if players are patient and value future earnings
enough. Consider an example of a similar game between two players as before with benefit
B=
2 and
loss e=1. A two-person variation is then given by the following structure shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Prisoner ’s dilemma game payoff structure.
C D
C1, 1 1, 2
D2, 1 0, 0
A repeated game in which each player adopts a strategy is played in consecutive rounds with
payoff uA,kfor player A(the row player in Table 2) in round k.A’s average payoff in infinite game is:
<uA>= (1δ)
k=0
δkuA,k, (1)
where
δ= (
0, 1
)
is a discount factor—a simple measure of player’s patience for future payments and
trust, or a measure of how the players value reputation [
73
]. Figure 1shows a “grim” strategy of the
row player
A
who plays
C
(cooperation) as long as the other player cooperates. As soon as the column
player Bdefects (plays D), the player Aswitches to Din the next and all following rounds.
Figure 1. Grim strategy and transitions in repeated game as finite state machine.
With such a strategy and with the payoffs given in Table 1, the players will cooperate if average
payoff for cooperation is greater than the average payoff for deviating (defecting):
<uC><uD>. (2)
Average payoff for cooperating is:
<uC>= (1δ)(1+δ+δ2+...) = 1, (3)
while for defecting after player Adefects in the first round we have:
<uD>= (1δ)(2+0δ+0δ2+...) = 2(1δ). (4)
Therefore, a sustained cooperation requires sufficient patience with discount factor
δ
1
/
2.
In large populations of players with random matching, maintaining cooperation requires larger values
of discount factor (Ellison 1994) than in the two player games. If reputations (histories) of players in
population of
N+
1 players are known but cannot be communicated or publicly shared in population
then cooperation will exist when
δ
1
1
/
2
N
[
73
]. However, in situations where players start with
and keep good reputation if they play (using a version of grim strategy as before)
C
against players
with good reputations and play D against players with bad reputations, cooperation is maintained
again with δ1/2.
We assert that even in one-shot games describing the situation in scholarly publishing as social
dilemma, the blockchain could, as a generator of trust, act as a promoter of cooperation. Let two
players
(A
,
B)
compete for priority in publishing a paper describing their research [
54
]. Each can either
honestly report their research without additional effort
e=
0 (choose to play
C
) or can spend an effort
e>
0 to hype up the paper to make it appear more attractive (choose to play
D
). The expected payoff
Publications 2019,7, 33 6 of 15
for researcher
A
depends on the reward for publishing
R
, the choice of effort and a function describing
the probability to publish that depends on the choices of both researchers:
uA=P(eA,eB)ReB. (5)
We interpret
P(eA
,
eB)
as the ability of the scientific community as a collective to discern between
honest research reporting and hyped up or even fraudulent papers. In publish-or-perish culture,
papers that appear more novel and exciting tend to get publishing priority over honest reporting.
This is modeled with
P(eA=e
,
eB=
0
) =
1 and
P(eA=
0,
eB=e) =
0 for player
A
, describing
publication bias found in peer review practice [
38
]. When the effort of both players is the same,
publishing probability equals a coin flip:
P(eA=e
,
eB=e) =
1
/
2, reflecting difficulties in recognizing
honest research reporting in the current pre-publication review system with small number of reviewers
involved in the recommendation process. Choosing
R=
4 and
e=
1, we have the following structure
for this game shown in Table 3.
Table 3.
Example of prisoner’s dilemma game capturing social dilemma in publish-or-perish
academic culture.
C D
C2, 2 0, 3
D3, 0 1, 1
This game portrays a social dilemma since even though mutual cooperation
(C
,
C)
offers better
payoffs to players, mutual defection—publish-or-perish behavior—is the dominant strategy for both
players, and therefore (D,D)is the game’s equilibrium.
Blockchain based solutions for publish-or-perish induced problems in scholarly communication
must include mechanisms and incentives that promote cooperation between researchers to, in the
sense of “publication game”, move the game equilibrium towards publish-and-flourish state
(C
,
C)
.
For instance, incentives for the community and mechanisms for lowering the publication bias so that
P(eA=e
,
eB=
0
) =
1
/
2 would lead, ceteris paribus, to the following game structure shown in Table 4.
Table 4. Example of a coordination game capturing social dilemma in publication game.
C D
C2, 2 0, 1
D1, 0 1, 1
The game with the structure shown in Table 4is an example of a coordination game [
74
] that
has two pure equilibria:
(C
,
C)
and
(D
,
D)
and a mixed equilibrium where both players choose
(D
,
D)
with probability
p=
0.5. Obviously,
(C
,
C)
publish-and-flourish equilibrium is the preferable
outcome for both players, but without communication between players prior to choosing strategy,
coordination failures (i.e., choosing
(D
,
D)
) occurs in these types of games [
75
]. However, using mutual
perfect communication prior to playing always leads to
(C
,
C)
equilibrium, while in games with noisy
communication the selection of strategy
C
by both players depends on the communication signal [
76
].
In blockchain supported scholarly communication, such signals are encoded in immutable memory of
past events visible to all members of the community.
To promote and maintain users’ cooperation and trustworthy publishing and reviewing
blockchain supported processes, the key elements—research papers and reviews—of these processes
must not be static objects. A continuous (non-static) nature of research papers and reviews refers
here to post-publication comments, reviews and curation that take place after the paper has
been published, shifting “curation from before to after publication” [
77
] keeping a research paper
Publications 2019,7, 33 7 of 15
“alive”. Research papers must, therefore, become modifiable entities under persistent review process.
A research paper is, in a sense, a contract between author(s) and the community (depending on,
for instance, strategic game rules as discussed before). It is an element or outcome of a social contract
between science and society under which researchers are expected to communicate their research
results to society. A while ago a call for for a new social contract that “will require more open, socially
distributed, self-organizing systems of knowledge production that generate their own accountability
and audit systems. Under the prevailing contract, science was left to make discoveries and then make
them available to society. A new contract will be based upon the joint production of knowledge by
society and science” [
78
] was made. Implementation of a research paper as a smart contract [
79
]
on a blockchain as discussed in the following section might be one possibility on how to imagine
knowledge production under new social contract.
3. The I8X Platform
In this section we introduce and describe the INFINITCODEX (I8X) (https://dev.infinitcodex.
com), scholarly publishing and reviewing blockchain based technology platform (Figure 2).
The I8X platform enables and supports entwining the two core processes of scholarly
communication—publishing and reviewing—by representing scholarly content as smart contracts
and incorporating cryptoeconomical incentives for building reputation in a trustworthy community
of users. Here, our intent is to introduce the idea and overview of I8X as a platform supporting
various functions of scholarly communication and not to go into implementation details and particular
use cases. We are well aware that practical challenges are huge when thinking about disrupting the
current models and major players in scholarly communication business. Our goal is to build the
platform infrastructure “that enables different providers to offer diverse services—publication of
versioned articles from preprints to the final version of record, quality controls before publication,
peer review, copy editing, post-publication curation, etc.” [
77
]. There are two processes embedded in
the protocol and services layer of the I8X technology stack to support development of applications in
the application layer. The infrastructure layer provides compute, storage, database and virtualization
support, the protocol layer defines blockchain network participation requirement and rules, method
and protocol of consensus, while the services layer contains blockchain services to enable development
of applications and connections to other technologies.
Figure 2. Technology stack of the I8X platform.
The two core processes were designed with three key principles in mind:
- transparency,
- integrity and
- engaging the members of the community.
Publications 2019,7, 33 8 of 15
Transparency, particularly in blockchain technology context, “is not simply about revealing
information or keeping secrets but continually deploying, configuring, and resisting platforms,
algorithms, and machine learning protocols that manage visibility” [
80
]. We agree that it is important
to “to differentiate between technical transparency—the ability of a technical solution to make
information available and/or accessible—and democratic transparency, an ideal of information
availability, accessibility, and actionability meant to serve broader social purposes, including public
actor accountability and citizen self-efficacy” [
70
]. Transparency of the I8X platform is in this sense
technological and allows members of the community to overview all blockchain transactions and
platform data. On the infrastructure and protocol layer (Figure 2) it is guarded by the consensus
mechanisms and network governance. However, we expect that on the application layer level the
community will develop solutions on top of the I8X platform that will support “social production
technology” [24] of scholarly communication.
How do these key principles of the I8X platform map to scholarly communication functions:
registration, certification, legitimization, dissemination, access, preservation, and curation [81]?
Registration is crucial for establishing precedence for scientific claims and attribution of results [
81
].
Platform functions based on blockchain protocols and governance (consensus rules) provides
users/authors with registration function by writing crypotgraphic hash of authors and paper metadata
(including the possible link to other preprint or self-archiving servers) on the blockchain following
consensus protocol. Immutability of the blockchain record also supports the legitimization function.
The certification function is provided by the reviewing process consisting of comments by the
community in the early phases of publication process, and of open peer review process that ends with
the decision. Both processes: publication and review are on I8X platform coupled by the community
engaged in these scholarly communication functions. This interaction of both processes integrated into
I8X platform helps to establish a workflow that “would allow the chaining of specific implementations
of the registration, certification, etc. functions into a pathway that could be followed by a unit of
communication” [82].
Dissemination and access functions are provided through platform functions and open APIs with
different privileges depending on user status, and curation through review process and publication
flow. Preservation of digital content is on I8X platform supported by peer-to-peer distributed file
systems (such as IPFS—InterPlanetary File System [
83
]) and in addition by uploading to open preprint
servers and self-archiving by the members of the community for redundancy. In a similar way, we can
map the I8X key principles to other descriptions of scholarly communication functions such as control
and moderation, certification and reputation, incentives [
84
], or registration, archiving, certification,
awareness [85]).
I8X blockchain protocol and developed services such as smart contracts contain incentives
(cryptoeconomic as well as social through reputation mechanisms) to stimulate community
engagement in all platform activities performed by community members. The functional overview of
the interdependence of processes, user interaction and community is shown in Figure 3.
The main function of the I8X platform is to translate user generated content—scholarly
communication (research paper, research idea, project proposal, etc.) into curated and reviewed
content. The output of the publishing and the review processes are curated reviews, a curated list of
trusted reviewers and open data access supported by I8X database of over 150 million metadata points
on research papers and high quality index of keywords, authors, organisations and citations. The data
on authors, reviews, reputation indices are stored and generated in a decentralized network and
accessible to everyone through Open APIs or interaction with smart contracts provided and supported
with our I8X technology stack.
There are three types of community members, each with specific roles in I8X platform:
- users,
- peers,
- developers.
Publications 2019,7, 33 9 of 15
Users are members of the community that interact with I8X platform through the application
layer that provides WebUI access and functionality. User actions include claiming existing research
articles and other published content, adding new content, reviewing and commenting on the content.
Figure 3. Functional overview of the I8X platform.
Peers are trusted members of the community that form and secure the blockchain network,
execute transactions through consensus mechanisms and connect applications with the blockchain.
Developers are community members that use and/or build open APIs, data models and
applications using I8X services. I8X applications are decentralized curated content collections. Some
examples of applications are: a single research paper, decentralized journal, journal issue or book,
decentralized conference proceedings, decentralized research project call.
One of the key parts of developing the I8X platform is the representation and encoding of content
(paper, report, abstract, data, code) as smart contract on the blockchain. We take a two-step approach
here: first we represent publishing phases of a research paper as a finite state machine, and then encode
the process into a smart contract [86].
Consider the process of publishing a research paper as an example. The process is started by the
user announcing the intent to publish a paper by submitting the (possibly yet unfinished) content to
the platform using one of the applications. The subset of content data (for instance authors, institutions,
title, abstract) is hashed and written to the blockchain to secure authorship to authors. The review
process (described below) is initiated by the author(s). The outcome of the review process can transition
the paper into a published one or return the paper to author(s) for further revisions and development.
The community can act also on already published content by raising an objective and proposing the
retraction of the published content.
To stimulate good behavior of users, to foster integrity and transparency of the network and to
engage community members into actively following publishing and review processes, we integrated
several socio-economic incentives and deterrents into the publishing and reviewing processes.
As an example
, users can use the I8X platform token for depositing in publishing and review processes.
By successfully performing certain tasks on the platform such as publishing content, writing reviews
and comments, users can earn tokens. The reputation of the user on I8X is a function of number of
tokens the users hold at each instant of time. Since the number of tokens reflects the reputation of a
user, they can exchange tokens only with I8X platform and not with other users. The internal token
economy on I8X for performing functions on the platform serve in this phase as a starting use case for
rewarding (and punishing) mechanisms for work done by researchers in scholarly communication
Publications 2019,7, 33 10 of 15
context (reviewing, commenting, curating, writing, etc.), and for building a community of peers.
However, we are well aware that building a trustworthy and sustainable academic reputation system
cannot be done in isolation from academic institutions and community.
A finite state machine (FSM) representing the paper has the following states (Figure 4): Active (
A
),
Under review (U), Published (P), and Retracted (R).
Figure 4. States and transitions in publishing process.
The FSM can change states with the transitions that are initiated by the community members.
There are the following transitions in the publishing FSM:
A=A
In this state transitions are initiated by community comments which preserve the state.
Community comments reflect expectations of the community about the research paper. There is
no deposit required to submit comments in this state.
A=U
This transition is initiated by the author when the paper is completed and ready for review. The author
deposits NA>NA,MI N tokens and this transaction triggers the start of the review process.
U=U
While the paper is in this state the review process is in progress. Community members can submit
comments about the paper which preserve this state. Commenting in this state works like a prediction
market [
87
90
] where users buy or sell shares for the outcome of the review process (revise or publish).
U=A
Initiated automatically by the platform as a result of reviewing process (with consensus by the listed
reviewers), decision = revise. The author loses the deposited tokens, users that have bought revise
shares receive reward.
U=P
Initiated automatically by the platform as a result of reviewing process (with consensus by the listed
reviewers), decision = publish. The author is rewarded for successful publication by
NP>NA
tokens,
and users that have bought publish shares receive reward.
P=P
In this state users can submit community comments without token deposit and reviews through review
process (see below) that can influence reputation of the reviewer and authors.
P=R
Publications 2019,7, 33 11 of 15
Usually an exceptional transition initiated by community member with “raise an objective”
mechanism followed by a dispute/challenge. The outcome is decisioned by consensus of the peers
(trusted community members).
R=R
Ris a final state, users can submit comments without depositing tokens.
We base our infrastructure and protocol layers on the family of Hyperledger technologies licensed
under the Apache 2.0 license and hosted by The Linux Foundation (https://www.hyperledger.org/).
Using these technologies recently proposed to be applied also in the academic publishing field [
91
],
we are building a community blockchain infrastructure and protocols that will support the services of
the platform and allow the development of applications.
4. Conclusions
Blockchain is a disruptive solution for scholarly communication that “can potentially transform
the current socio-technical stasis of moral and market crises associated with academic publishing” [
92
].
The current scientific publishing system relies on trusted third parties (journals, editorial boards,
editors) that provide interactions between authors and reviewers, and there are conflicting incentives
and lack of trust among participants. There is definitely a need for an objective, immutable history (or
memory) of research results, and for a fair attribution and recognition of authorship that is verified
through peer-to-peer consensus mechanisms.
We have presented our implementation of a blockchain based platform for scholarly
communication that stands on community driven publishing and reviewing processes and we
introduced a research paper as a modifiable entity. Using a strategic game setting, we presented
some of the social dilemmas occurring in academic publishing and showed that building the
trustworthy scientific community is key for changing the current publish-or-perish culture into a
publish-and-flourish one.
Building a trusted peer-to-peer community requires transparency and right incentives for all
participants. Various propositions for token-based economy and reward systems in decentralized
scholarly publishing have already been advanced [
14
], including incentives structure in peer review
processes based on external cryptocurrency markets [
51
]. However, what should proper incentives
in scholarly communication really achieve? As we have argued here, we believe that whatever the
mechanism, the goal must be to establish “a fair game for staking our reputation, so that on questions
of interest to funders, we converge as fast as possible to the “right” answer [89].
Author Contributions:
All authors contributed equally to this article. The individual contributions of the authors
according to the specific tasks in researching and preparing the article are as follows: Conceptualization, A.D. and
D.K.; Software, A.D., U.D. (Uroš Droftina), T.K. and U.D. (Urban Duh); Visualization, T.S.K.; Writing—original
draft, D.K.; Writing—review & editing, E.S.D., A.D., U.D. (Uroš Droftina), T.K., U.D. (Urban Duh), T.S.K. and D.K.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Conflicts of Interest:
Authors of this paper are affiliated also with the company Infinitcodex, Ltd. that develops
technological solutions for scholarly communications partially based on ideas presented in this paper.
References
1. Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide; NYU Press: New York, NY, USA, 2006.
2.
Duh, A.; Meznaric, S.; Korošak, D. Guerrilla media: Interactive social media. In Media Convergence
Handbook—Volume 1; Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2016; pp. 307–324.
3.
Vosoughi, S.; Roy, D.; Aral, S. The spread of true and false news online. Science
2018
,359, 1146–1151.
[CrossRef] [PubMed]
4.
Duh, A.; Slak Rupnik, M.; Korošak, D. Collective Behavior of Social Bots Is Encoded in Their Temporal
Twitter Activity. Big Data 2018,6, 113–123. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
Publications 2019,7, 33 12 of 15
5.
Lazer, D.M.; Baum, M.A.; Benkler, Y.; Berinsky, A.J.; Greenhill, K.M.; Menczer, F.; Metzger, M.J.; Nyhan, B.;
Pennycook, G.; Rothschild, D.; et al. The science of fake news. Science 2018,359, 1094–1096. [CrossRef]
6.
Kirchherr, J. Why We Can’T Trust Academic Journals to Tell the Scientific Truth. Available online:
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/jun/06/why-we-cant-trust-academic-
journals-to-tell-the-scientific-truth (accessed on 14 April 2018).
7.
Wüst, K.; Gervais, A. Do you need a Blockchain? In Proceedings of the 2018 Crypto Valley Conference on
Blockchain Technology (CVCBT), Zug, Switzerland, 20–22 June 2018.
8. van Rossum, J. Blockchain for Research; Digital Science: London, UK, 2017.
9.
Janowicz, K.; Regalia, B.; Hitzler, P.; Mai, G.; Delbecque, S.; Fröhlich, M.; Martinent, P.; Lazarus, T. On the
prospects of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for open science and academic publishing.
Semant. Web 2018,9, 545–555. [CrossRef]
10.
Bartling, S.; Friesike, S. Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research,
Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing; Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2014.
11.
Nakamoto, S. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. 2008. Available online: https://bitcoin.org/
bitcoin.pdf (accessed on 28 May 2019).
12.
Buterin, V. A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. White Paper.
2014. Available online: https://www.weusecoins.com/assets/pdf/library/Ethereum_white_paper_a_
next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf (accessed on
28 May 2019).
13.
Tapscott, D.; Tapscott, A. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business,
and the World; Penguin: London, UK, 2016.
14. Swan, M. Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy; O’Reilly Media, Inc.: Newton, MA, USA, 2015.
15. Brücher, B.L. Science Belongs to No One—And to Everyone. 4open 2018. [CrossRef]
16. Romer, P.M. Mathiness in the theory of economic growth. Am. Econ. Rev. 2015,105, 89–93. [CrossRef]
17.
Ziman, J.M. Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science; Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, UK, 1978.
18.
Hargens, L.L. Scholarly consensus and journal rejection rates. Am. Sociol. Rev.
1988
,53, 139–151. [CrossRef]
19.
Cleland, C.E. Prediction and explanation in historical natural science. Br. J. Philos. Sci.
2011
,62, 551–582.
[CrossRef]
20.
Leonelli, S. Rethinking Reproducibility as a Criterion for Research Quality. In Including a Symposium on Mary
Morgan: Curiosity, Imagination, and Surprise; Emerald Publishing Limited: Bingley, UK, 2018; pp. 129–146.
21. Cole, S. The hierarchy of the sciences? Am. J. Sociol. 1983,89, 111–139. [CrossRef]
22.
Nosek, B.A.; Bar-Anan, Y. Scientific utopia: I. Opening scientific communication. Psychol. Inq.
2012
,
23, 217–243. [CrossRef]
23.
Potts, J.; Hartley, J.; Montgomery, L.; Neylon, C.; Rennie, E. A journal is a club: A new economic model for
scholarly publishing. Prometheus 2017,35, 75–92. [CrossRef]
24.
Hartley, J.; Potts, J.; Montgomery, L.; Rennie, E.; Neylon, C. Do we need to move from communication
technology to user community? A new economic model of the journal as a club. Learn. Publ.
2019
,32, 27–35.
[CrossRef]
25. Brembs, B. Reliable novelty: New should not trump true. PLoS Biol. 2019,17, e3000117. [CrossRef]
26.
Larivière, V.; Haustein, S.; Mongeon, P. The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. PLoS ONE
2015,10, e0127502. [CrossRef]
27.
Bogich, T.; Ballesteros, S.; Berjon, R. On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication. 2016.
Available online: https://research.science.ai/bogich2016 (accessed on 28 May 2019).
28.
Schmitt, J. Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.
2015. Available online: https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can- t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-
billion-dollar-a-year-academic- publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a (accessed on 28 May 2019).
29. Bergstrom, T.C. Free labour for costly journals? J. Econ. Perspect. 2001,15, 183–198. [CrossRef]
30.
Papatheodorou, S.I.; Trikalinos, T.A.; Ioannidis, J.P. Inflated numbers of authors over time have not been just
due to increasing research complexity. J.Clin. Epidemiol. 2008,61, 546–551. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
31.
Ioannidis, J.P.; Klavans, R.; Boyack, K.W. Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days. Nature
2018,561, 167–169. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
Publications 2019,7, 33 13 of 15
32.
Chu, J.S.; Evans, J.A. Too Many Papers? Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science. 2018.
Available online: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jk63c/ (accessed on 28 May 2019).
33.
Grimes, D.R.; Bauch, C.T.; Ioannidis, J.P. Modelling science trustworthiness under publish or perish pressure.
R. Soc. Open Sci. 2018,5, 171511. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
34.
Beall, J. Predatory journals exploit structural weaknesses in scholarly publishing. 4open
2018
,1, 1. [CrossRef]
35.
Amaral, O.B. All publishers are predatory-some are bigger than others. Anais da Academia Brasileira de
Ciências 2018,90, 1643–1647. [CrossRef]
36.
Smith, R. Peer review: A flawed process at the heart of science and journals. J. R. Soc. Med.
2006
,99, 178–182.
[CrossRef]
37.
Hatton, L.; Warr, G. Scientific Peer Review: An Ineffective and Unworthy Institution.
Available online: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/scientific-peer-review-ineffective-and-
unworthy-institution (accessed on 14 April 2018).
38.
Lee, C.J.; Sugimoto, C.R.; Zhang, G.; Cronin, B. Bias in peer review. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol.
2013
,64, 2–17.
[CrossRef]
39.
Lee, C.J.; Moher, D. Promote scientific integrity via journal peer review data. Science
2017
,357, 256–257.
[CrossRef]
40.
Taichman, D. Misuse of Received Manuscripts by Peer Reviewers: A Cross-Sectional Survey. 2017. Available
online: http://peerreviewcongress.org/prc17-0151 (accessed on 28 May 2019).
41.
Tomkins, A.; Zhang, M.; Heavlin, W.D. Reviewer bias in single-versus double-blind peer review. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. USA 2017,114, 12708–12713. [CrossRef]
42.
Ioannidis, J.P. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med.
2005
,2, e124. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
43.
Buranyi, S. Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science. Guardian
2017
,
27, 2017.
44.
Smaldino, P.E.; McElreath, R. The natural selection of bad science. R. Soc. Open Sci.
2016
,3, 160384.
[CrossRef]
45.
Edwards, M.A.; Roy, S. Academic research in the 21st century: Maintaining scientific integrity in a climate of
perverse incentives and hypercompetition. Environ. Eng. Sci. 2017,34, 51–61. [CrossRef]
46. Martinson, B.C. Give researchers a lifetime word limit. Nat. News 2017,550, 303. [CrossRef]
47. Stephan, P.; Veugelers, R.; Wang, J. Blinkered by bibliometrics. Nature 2017,544, 411–412. [CrossRef]
48.
Higginson, A.D.; Munafò, M.R. Current incentives for scientists lead to underpowered studies with
erroneous conclusions. PLoS Biol. 2016,14, e2000995. [CrossRef]
49.
Pepe, A.; Cantiello, M.; Nicholson, J. The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv. arXiv
2017
,
arXiv:1709.07020.
50. Crous, C.J. Could disruptive technologies also reform academia? Web Ecol. 2017,17, 47–50. [CrossRef]
51.
Avital, M. Peer Review: Toward a Blockchain-enabled Market-based Ecosystem. Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst.
2018,42, 28. [CrossRef]
52.
Maxwell, D.; Speed, C.; Pschetz, L. Story Blocks: Reimagining narrative through the blockchain. Convergence
2017,23, 79–97. [CrossRef]
53. Fudenberg, D.; Tirole, J. Game theory, 1991. Camb. Mass. 1991,393, 80.
54.
Gall, T.; Maniadis, Z. Evaluating solutions to the problem of false positives. Res. Policy
2019
,48, 506–515.
[CrossRef]
55.
Leek, J.T.; Taub, M.A.; Pineda, F.J. Cooperation between referees and authors increases peer review accuracy.
PLoS ONE 2011,6, e26895. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
56.
Ellison, G. Evolving standards for academic publishing: A q-r theory. J. Polit. Econ.
2002
,110, 994–1034.
[CrossRef]
57.
Lacetera, N.; Zirulia, L. The economics of scientific misconduct. J. Law Econ. Organ.
2009
,27, 568–603.
[CrossRef]
58.
Kiri, B.; Lacetera, N.; Zirulia, L. Above a swamp: A theory of high-quality scientific production. Res. Policy
2018,47, 827–839. [CrossRef]
59.
Gall, T.; Ioannidis, J.P.; Maniadis, Z. The credibility crisis in research: Can economics tools help? PLoS Biol.
2017,15, e2001846. [CrossRef]
60.
Stafford, T. Reviews, Reviewers, and Reviewing: The “Tragedy of the Commons” in the Scientific Publication
Process. Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst. 2018,42, 25. [CrossRef]
Publications 2019,7, 33 14 of 15
61. Hardin, G. The tragedy of the commons. Science 1968,162, 1243–1248.
62.
Kuhn, S. Prisoner’s Dilemma. 2017. Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/
entries/prisoner-dilemma/ (accessed on 28 May 2019).
63.
Nowak, M.A.; Sigmund, K. Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring. Nature
1998
,393, 573.
[CrossRef]
64.
Milinski, M.; Semmann, D.; Krambeck, H.J. Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Nature
2002,415, 424. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
65.
Van Vugt, M. Averting the tragedy of the commons: Using social psychological science to protect the
environment. Curr. Direct. Psychol. Sci. 2009,18, 169–173. [CrossRef]
66.
Ibáñez, L.D.; O’Hara, K.; Simperl, E. On Blockchains and the General Data Protection Regulation. 2018.
Available online: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/422879 (accessed on 28 May 2019).
67. North, D.C. Institutions. J. Econ. Perspect. 1991,5, 97–112. [CrossRef]
68. Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons; Cambridge University Press; Cambridge , UK, 1990.
69.
Walden, J. Past, Present, Future: From Co-Ops to Cryptonetworks. Available online: https://a16z.com/
2019/03/02/cooperatives-cryptonetworks/ (accessed on 8 March 2019).
70.
Hofman, D.; Novin, A. Blocked and chained: Blockchain and the problems of transparency. Proc. Assoc. Inf.
Sci. Technol. 2018,55, 171–178. [CrossRef]
71.
Economist, T. The promise of the blockchain: The trust machine. Economist
2015
,31. Available online:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/10/31/the-trust-machine (accessed on 28 March 2019).
72.
Ellison, G. Cooperation in the prisoner ’s dilemma with anonymous random matching. Rev. Econ. Stud.
1994,61, 567–588. [CrossRef]
73.
Friedman, E.; Resnick, P.; Sami, R. Manipulation-resistant reputation systems. In Algorithmic Game Theory;
Nisan, N., Roughgarden, T., Tardos, E., Vazirani, V., Eds.; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2007;
Chapter 27, pp. 677–698
74. Cooper, R. Coordination Games; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1999.
75.
Cooper, R.; DeJong, D.V.; Forsythe, R.; Ross, T.W. Communication in coordination games. Q. J. Econ.
1992
,
107, 739–771. [CrossRef]
76.
Carlsson, H.; Van Damme, E. Global games and equilibrium selection. Econometrica
1993
,61, 989–1018.
[CrossRef]
77.
Stern, B.M.; O’Shea, E.K. A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences. PLoS Biol.
2019,17, e3000116. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
78. Gibbons, M. Science’s new social contract with society. Nature 1999,402, C81. [CrossRef] [PubMed]
79. Szabo, N. Formalizing and securing relationships on public networks. First Monday 1997,2. [CrossRef]
80.
Ananny, M.; Crawford, K. Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application
to algorithmic accountability. New Media Soc. 2018,20, 973–989. [CrossRef]
81.
Borgman, C.L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet; MIT Press: Cambridge,
MA, USA, 2007.
82.
Sompel, H.V.; Payette, S.; Erickson, J.; Lagoze, C.; Warner, S. Rethinking scholarly communication: Building
the system that scholars deserve. D-Lib Mag. 2004. [CrossRef]
83. Benet, J. Ipfs-content addressed, versioned, p2p file system. arXiv 2014, arXiv:1407.3561.
84. Tennant, J.P. The state of the art in peer review. FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 2018,365, fny204. [CrossRef]
85.
Hummels, H.; Roosendaal, H.E. Trust in scientific publishing. J. Bus. Ethics
2001
,34, 87–100. [CrossRef]
[PubMed]
86.
Mavridou, A.; Laszka, A. Designing secure Ethereum smart contracts: A finite state machine based approach.
arXiv 2017, arXiv:1711.09327.
87.
Thicke, M. Prediction Markets for Science: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease? Soc. Epistemol.
2017
,
31, 451–467. [CrossRef]
88.
Arrow, K.J.; Forsythe, R.; Gorham, M.; Hahn, R.; Hanson, R.; Ledyard, J.O.; Levmore, S.; Litan, R.; Milgrom,
P.; Nelson, F.D.; et al. The promise of prediction markets. Science 2008,320, 877. [CrossRef]
89.
Hanson, R. Could Gambling Save Science? Encouraging an Honest Consensus; Taylor & Francis: Abingdon,
UK, 1995.
90.
Hanson, R. Logarithmic markets coring rules for modular combinatorial information aggregation. J. Predict.
Mark. 2012,1, 3–15.
Publications 2019,7, 33 15 of 15
91.
Novotny, P.; Zhang, Q.; Hull, R.; Baset, S.; Laredo, J.; Vaculin, R.; Ford, D.L.; Dillenberger, D.N. Permissioned
blockchain technologies for academic publishing. Inf. Serv. Use 2018. [CrossRef]
92.
Swist, T.; Magee, L. Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical
Executions of Code. Cult. Unbound J. Curr. Cult. Res. 2018,9, 240–259. [CrossRef]
c
2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access
article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
... As far as we know, there are not many studies proposed in the literature related to blockchain-based scientific publishing systems. The blockchain-based scientific publishing system methods are provided in research articles [15,[20][21][22][23]25,26]. We discuss each related article based on the proposed method, main idea, and advantages-disadvantages. ...
... Stojmenova Duh et al. introduced a blockchain-based decentralized scholarly communication model that relies on strategic game-playing by researchers [26]. According to the paper, the academic world puts a lot of pressure on researchers to rapidly publish scientific papers. ...
... Since the idea of blockchain-based publishing systems is quite new, there are no numerous research papers published in this field. The articles evaluated in the literature reviews suffer from many aspects, which can be seen in [15,[20][21][22][23]25,26]. For instance, in the study [20], the proposed blockchain-based system was adopted from a similar framework from the literature, so the novelty was limited. ...
Article
Full-text available
The scientific publishing industry is dominated by a few publishers that use centralized systems, which decrease the quality of studies and make the publication process longer. Traditional publication systems generally have high publication costs, slow and biased review processes, copyrights held by publishers, lack of rewards for contributors, lack of connection among researchers, etc. Accordingly, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based scientific publication platform to eliminate the traditional publication system deficiencies. The proposed system uses Ethereum smart contracts to accelerate the publication process and abate the biased evaluation process while reducing the publication cost. The proposed model also improves the quality of scientific studies by adding new features to the publication process. The proposed system increases the number of publishers, makes the publication process fully traceable, and makes scientific papers globally available to anyone with a small fee. In addition, the system provides journals with decentralized models and integrates scientific papers with related data or datasets. The editors, reviewers, and cited authors are also rewarded. The proposed system has been implemented using Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which consists of a front-end, middleware, and back-end. When an author submits a manuscript for evaluation, the system automatically finds the most appropriate editors and reviewers for related fields. After the publication process finishes, editors, reviewers, cited authors, and other contributors are rewarded as a system token-based cryptocurrency.
... As far as we know, there are not many studies proposed in the literature related to blockchain-based scientific publishing systems. The blockchain-based scientific publishing system methods are provided in research articles [15,[20][21][22][23]25,26]. We discuss each related article based on the proposed method, main idea, and advantages-disadvantages. ...
... Stojmenova Duh et al. introduced a blockchain-based decentralized scholarly communication model that relies on strategic game-playing by researchers [26]. According to the paper, the academic world puts a lot of pressure on researchers to rapidly publish scientific papers. ...
... Since the idea of blockchain-based publishing systems is quite new, there are no numerous research papers published in this field. The articles evaluated in the literature reviews suffer from many aspects, which can be seen in [15,[20][21][22][23]25,26]. For instance, in the study [20], the proposed blockchain-based system was adopted from a similar framework from the literature, so the novelty was limited. ...
Article
Full-text available
The scientific publishing industry is dominated by a few publishers that use centralized systems, which decrease the quality of studies and make the publication process longer. Traditional publication systems generally have high publication costs, slow and biased review processes, copyrights held by publishers, lack of rewards for contributors, lack of connection among researchers, etc. Accordingly, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based scientific publication platform to eliminate the traditional publication system deficiencies. The proposed system uses Ethereum smart contracts to accelerate the publication process and abate the biased evaluation process while reducing the publication cost. The proposed model also improves the quality of scientific studies by adding new features to the publication process. The proposed system increases the number of publishers, makes the publication process fully traceable, and makes scientific papers globally available to anyone with a small fee. In addition, the system provides journals with decentralized models and integrates scientific papers with related data or datasets. The editors, reviewers, and cited authors are also rewarded. The proposed system has been implemented using Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which consists of a front-end, middleware, and back-end. When an author submits a manuscript for evaluation, the system automatically finds the most appropriate editors and reviewers for related fields. After the publication process finishes, editors, reviewers, cited authors, and other contributors are rewarded as a system token-based cryptocurrency.
... Writing academic books, monographs and publishing them is a part and parcel in the professional life of academicians: publish-and-Flourish. Scholastic dissemination is an overarching vehicle of insightful correspondence is submerged in publish-or-perish [78]. In general, the author is honoured by royalty; the absence of transparency of the genuine number of deals and the hidden division of advantage between the publisher, distributor and the author is the current debilitating situation. ...
... Hence, these authors, publishers, and distributors are in dire need of a genuine platform that should properly incentives for their exertion. BCT based applications provides numerous solutions relating to this domain issues: editorial platforms and many more [79,80,81,82,78,83]. ...
Article
Full-text available
The potential of evidence-based sensible insights of a domain can ignite and illuminate research practice and scope for further research. Education sector is in the infancy stage in leveraging benefits of blockchain technology (BCT). This paper is an attempt to systematically review the applications of BCT in the education sector, to elicit the implicit/hidden scope for further research, to contribute to the expansion of the existing knowledge. The scientifically collected research articles, conference papers, and grey literature exclusively on BCT applications in the education sector are reviewed adopting the systematized review approach. The aim of the study is to explore and infer the existing BCT applications in the education sector highlight the potential implications and root level constraints for stakeholders; based on the review findings and evidence the scope for further research is highlighted. The scope of the article is limited to the review of BCT applications, implications, and constraints to the education sector. This investigation will permit instructive foundations to evaluate and choose what BCT applications in education will be useful to them dependent on their individual organizational requirements. The review is not a fully systematic but systematized state-of-the-art review. Some of the potential, feasible evidence-based educational areas seeking BCT applications are highlighted as scope for further research. The paper is an original systematized review in the domain.
... The maturity level most achieved by the papers (Figure 8) was Prototype, followed by Model and Concept. There were also studies at initial stages, with a Concept maturity level, as well as the studies by Duh et al. (2019) and Gipp et al. (2017), already available as services. ...
... It is worth noting that, for Wang et al. (2020), IPFS was counted for both Ethereum and PubChain, just as for Khan and Shahaab (2021) it was counted for Hyperledger and Corda. On the other hand, Duh et al. (2019) presented three possibilities for storing papers: Preprint Servers, Self-archiving and IPFS, so, in this case, Hyperledger was counted for all three. ...
Article
Purpose This paper presents a review of the state of the art on the application of blockchain and smart contracts to the peer-review process of scientific papers. The paper seeks to analyse how the main characteristics of the existing blockchain solutions in this field to detect opportunities for the improvement of future applications. Design/methodology/approach A systematic review of the literature on the subject was carried out in three databases recognized by the research community (IEEE Xplore, Scopus and Web of Science) and the Frontiers in Blockchain journal. A total of 1,967 articles were initially found, and after the exclusion process, the 26 remaining articles were classified according to the following dimensions: System Type, Open Access, Review Type, Reviewer Incentive, Token Economy, Blockchain Access, Blockchain Identification, Blockchain Used, Paper Storage, Anonymity and Maturity of the solution. Findings Results show that the solutions are normally concerned on offering incentives to the reviewers' work (often monetary). Other common general preferences among the solutions are the adoption of open reviews, the use of Ethereum , the implementation of publishing ecosystems and the use of InterPlanetary File System to the storage of the papers. Originality/value There are currently no studies covering the main aspects of blockchain solutions in the field of scientific peer review. The present study provides an overall review of the topic, summarizing important information on the current research and helping new adopters to develop solutions grounded on the existing literature.
... indent Some of the notable platform-based SPS are ARTi-FACTs [51], Academic Endorsement System (AES) [49], Decentralized Research Platform (DEIP) [52], INFINITCODEX (18X) [53], Orvium [50], Publish and Evaluate Onchain (PEvO) [54], Pluto [55], Eureka [56,57], ScienceRoot [58] are BCbased scientific publishing platforms. ...
... Data can be accessed using APIs or SCs, which are stored in a decentralized network. This platform does not support a funding mechanism [53]. ...
Article
Scientific publishing systems (SPS) provides platforms to authors, reviewers, and editors to express research for the betterment of the community. Traditionally, the research databases are assigned electronic identifiers, and manuscripts are preserved in electronic form. Owing to the large scale of submissions in the databases, it becomes difficult for the repositories to manage their electronic volumes. The search queries and retrievals are complex, and the publishing process takes a lot of time, which defeats the purpose of the contribution in many cases by the author. Moreover, the process is non-transparent, and is limited due to ineffective article tracking policies. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the libraries have transitioned towards smart objects that process academic repositories with low-powered computations. In the same way, meta-information passes through lightweight IoT protocols to distributed servers. Coupled with blockchain (BC), a secured and trusted publishing platform is assured in SPS, with transparency among all academic stakeholders. Traditional SPS platforms do not provide any rewarding method for peer review and do not support and store unsuccessful articles. Besides, published works are not verified thoroughly, and this can lead to misconduct in scientific publishing. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a survey on the fusion of BC and IoT for SPS, which serves the dual purpose of low-powered computational tagging of manuscripts as smart objects, and that also supports rewarding and completing the verification of transactions by peers without involving a third party. A case study of a hyperledger driven IoT-enabled scientific publishing system (SPS) is proposed to address the limitations of the traditional SPS. Lastly, we present open issues and challenges concerning the current SPSs and the proposed BC-driven SPS.
... Current examples of such platforms are public repositories such as arXiv (Nosek and Bar-Anan, 2012). Several blockchain-based publishing repositories have also recently been proposed (e.g., Leible et al., 2019;Stojmenova Duh et al., 2019). A disconnected psychologist would upload their publication to the platform, which would count as publishing, and this is when the ongoing public peer review process would start. ...
Article
Full-text available
Disconnected psychology is a form of psychological science in which researchers ground their work upon the main principles of psychological method but are detached from a "field" consisting of other psychologists that comprises connected psychology. It has previously been proposed that combining the two forms of psychology would result in the most significant advancement of psychological knowledge (Krpan, 2020). However, disconnected psychology may seem to be an "abstract utopia", given that it has not been previously detailed how to put it into practice. The present article therefore sets the practical foundations of disconnected psychology. In this regard, I first describe a hypothetical disconnected psychologist and discuss relevant methodological and epistemological implications. I then propose how this variant of psychology could be integrated with the current academic system (i.e., with connected psychology). Overall, the present article transforms disconnected psychology from a hazy dream into substance that could eventually maximize psychological knowledge, even if implementing it would require a radical transformation of psychological science.
... Emilija Stojmenova Duh et. al. [30] developed a blockchain system for decentralized scholarly communication. It executes a modifiable research paper in blockchain smart contract. ...
Article
Full-text available
Academic journal publishing is beset by a variety of challenges, including an ineffective peer review process and the growth of cloned and hijacked publications. All of these difficulties add to a lack of trust and degrade academics' reputations. These challenges can be addressed using blockchain because of its properties and its ability to do smart contracts. Smart contracts have been discovered to be underutilized in Scholarly Communication. According to our examination of the literature, intelligent system for scholarly communication and scientific publishing have not yet been deployed. For the implementation, Ethereum and Solidity language were used. The software languages and technologies used to construct role-based smart contracts are: solidity programming language, the TestNet blockchain, the Remix WebIDE, and the Metamask Web3 wallet. In this paper, we have designed and developed an intelligent role-based smart contract with respect to authors, publishers and reviewers. Our innovative approach in developing smart contracts for scholarly communication ensures academic honesty, integrity, and timeliness.
Article
Full-text available
This study explores the selective corpus of existing literature on Open Peer Review (OPR) to understand and map the extent of adoption of OPR in the scholarly communication, the reflection of different aspects of human emotion embedded in the open peer review reports and authors' response as well, the influence of OPR reports on citation status of articles, and application of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and similar technologies in improving the operational viability as well as acceptability of OPR among the scholarly community. The study finds the emergence of various OPR adoption policies and levels of adoption together with emerging models of scientific publishing. Clearly, there is a lack of uniform OPR adoption policy. It also highlights the association of different sets of human emotional traits with OPR reports. The experimentation with the possibility of treating preprint servers and open access repositories as a manuscript marketplace for the eventual selection of articles for open peer review and journal publication is noticed. More research on the influence of human behavioural aspects on OPR practice and the application of emergent technologies in OPR would be required before finally settling down on a stable roadmap for OPR.
Chapter
Full-text available
The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing fast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for implementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications in a broad range of areas, including finance and the Internet-of-Things. However, a significant number of smart contracts deployed in practice suffer from security vulnerabilities, which enable malicious users to steal assets from a contract or to cause damage. Vulnerabilities present a serious issue since contracts may handle financial assets of considerable value, and contract bugs are non-fixable by design. To help developers create more secure smart contracts, we introduce FSolidM, a framework rooted in rigorous semantics for designing contracts as Finite State Machines (FSM). We present a tool for creating FSM on an easy-to-use graphical interface and for automatically generating Ethereum contracts. Further, we introduce a set of design patterns, which we implement as plugins that developers can easily add to their contracts to enhance security and functionality.
Article
Full-text available
Science advances through rich, scholarly discussion. More than ever before, digital tools allow us to take that dialogue online. To chart a new future for open publishing, we must consider alternatives to the core features of the legacy print publishing system, such as an access paywall and editorial selection before publication. Although journals have their strengths, the traditional approach of selecting articles before publication (“curate first, publish second”) forces a focus on “getting into the right journals,” which can delay dissemination of scientific work, create opportunity costs for pushing science forward, and promote undesirable behaviors among scientists and the institutions that evaluate them. We believe that a “publish first, curate second” approach with the following features would be a strong alternative: authors decide when and what to publish; peer review reports are published, either anonymously or with attribution; and curation occurs after publication, incorporating community feedback and expert judgment to select articles for target audiences and to evaluate whether scientific work has stood the test of time. These proposed changes could optimize publishing practices for the digital age, emphasizing transparency, peer-mediated improvement, and post-publication appraisal of scientific articles.
Article
Full-text available
Although a case can be made for rewarding scientists for risky, novel science rather than for incremental, reliable science, novelty without reliability ceases to be science. The currently available evidence suggests that the most prestigious journals are no better at detecting unreliable science than other journals. In fact, some of the most convincing studies show a negative correlation, with the most prestigious journals publishing the least reliable science. With the credibility of science increasingly under siege, how much longer can we afford to reward novelty at the expense of reliability? Here, I argue for replacing the legacy journals with a modern information infrastructure that is governed by scholars. This infrastructure would allow renewed focus on scientific reliability, with improved sort, filter, and discovery functionalities, at massive cost savings. If these savings were invested in additional infrastructure for research data and scientific code and/or software, scientific reliability would receive additional support, and funding woes—for, e.g., biological databases—would be a concern of the past.
Article
Full-text available
Much of the argument around reforming, remaking, or preserving the traditions of scholarly publishing is built on economic principles, explicit or implicit. Can we afford open access (OA)? How do we pay for high‐quality services? Why does it cost so much? In this article, we argue that the sterility of much of this debate is a result of failure to tackle the question of what a journal is in economic terms. We offer a way through by demonstrating that a journal is a club and discuss the implications for the scholarly publishing industry. We use examples, ranging from OA to prestige journals, to explain why congestion is a problem for club‐based publications, and to discuss the importance of creative destruction for the maintenance of knowledge‐generating communities in publishing.
Article
Full-text available
Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to transform the academic publishing domain and to address some of the current problems such as productivity and reputation management, predatory publishing, transparent peer-review processes and many others. In this paper, we outline the technologies available in the domain of permissioned blockchains with focus on Hyperledger Fabric and discuss how they can be leveraged in the domain of academic publishing.
Article
Blockchain is frequently claimed to be a democratizing technology. However, its relationship to both law and broader democratic institutions remains uncertain. One claim regarding blockchain's democratic potential is that it is radically transparent and can bring such transparency to existing systems of governance. This paper interrogates that claim in three different ways. Firstly, it examines blockchain technology against broader theories of transparency. Secondly, it examines the relationship between transparency and democracy, questioning how blockchain technologies could mediate that relationship. Finally, it examines how blockchain technologies could impact a particular exercise of transparency, freedom of information requests. This paper finds the relationship of transparency itself to democratic ideals is complex, contested and highly context‐dependent; the “democratizing” technological transparency built into blockchains could easily prove undemocratic in application. Blockchain technology cannot meet broader transparency goals without addressing political gatekeepers and the legal, social, and cultural needs that animate those goals.
Book
An exploration of the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the scholarly infrastructure needed to support research activities in all fields in the twenty-first century. Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century. Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending “data deluge” exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure—scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others—to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.
Chapter
See full text here: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14352/
Article
To highlight uncertain norms in authorship, John P. A. Ioannidis, Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack identified the most prolific scientists of recent years.