Blockchain-Enabled Trust Mechanisms in Decentralized Academic Publishing Ecosystems

Abstract

The academic publishing has traditionally been criticized because of transparency concerns, prejudice, and the superiority of the centralized publishers. The opportunity that blockchain technology has brought to the field of scholarly communication is the possibility of transforming the field by bringing in the element of trust, immutability, and decentralized validation schemes. The proposed research is an inquiry into creating a blockchain-based trust system in academic publishing systems. The suggested model will combine smart contracts, decentralized identity management, and tokenized peer-review systems to allow delivering research outputs in a safe, verifiable, and fair manner. The paper assesses the efficiency of the transactions, the increase in transparency, and the responsibility of the reviewers using a prototype implemented using the Ethereum blockchain. The results indicate that blockchain-based trust protocols can minimize the rate of fraudulent publication by 38 and transparency of peer-review by 52 in comparison to traditional systems. The study is an input to the architecture of a durable and decentralized academic communication system.