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. 2024 Nov 27:3:117.
doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.15771.2. eCollection 2023.

Prospects of digital scientific publishing on blockchain: The concept of DAP

Karolj Skala  1 , Zorislav Šojat  1 , Josip Maričević  2 , Davor Davidović  1 , Viktor Bojović  1 , Tomislav Zubčić  2 , Branimir Kolarek  1 , Dario Pažin  2 , Draško Tomić  1 , Tadej Slapnik  3 , Mario Pecimotika  1
Affiliations

Prospects of digital scientific publishing on blockchain: The concept of DAP

Karolj Skala et al. Open Res Eur. .

Abstract

Background: Traditional publishing models, open access and major publishers, cannot adequately address the key challenges of academic publishing today: Speed of peer review, recognition of work and incentive mechanisms, transparency and thrust of the system.

Methods: To address these challenges, the authors propose Democratisation of Academic Publishing (DAP) platform, which is based on the novel HashNET DLT platform. The DAP introduces several innovative components: tracking the activities of all participants in the peer review process using blockchain and smart contracts, the introduction of the Scholarly Wallet for holding reputation (non-fungible) and reward (fungible) tokens, the use of the Scholarly Wallet as the main interface to the DAP platform, the Virtual Editor that enables automatic discovery of the research area and invitation of reviewers, and finally the global database of evaluated reviewers, ranked by the quality of their previous work.

Results: The DAP platform is in the development phase, with the design and functionalities of all modules defined. An exception is the central component of DAP, the Scholarly Wallet module, whose first prototype has already been created, tested and published. The implementation of DAP is planned for the next phase of the HorizonEurope TruBlo project and other research initiatives. The DAP platform will be connected to the publishing ecosystem: 1) as a backend system (distributed blockchain database) for existing publishing platforms and 2) as a standalone publishing platform with its own API interface.

Conclusions: The authors believe that DAP has the potential to significantly improve academic peer review and knowledge dissemination. It is expected that the use of blockchain technology, the fast HashNET consensus platform and tokens for reward (fungible) and reputation/ranking (non-fungible) will lead to a more efficient and transparent way of rewarding all participants in the peer review process and ultimately advance scientific research.

Keywords: Academic publishing; HashNet; blockchain; distributed computing; distributed ledger technology; reviewer recognition; reviewer success ranking; smart contract; transparent peer review.

Plain language summary

The paper "Prospects of digital scientific publishing on blockchain: The concept of DAP" proposes the use of Decentralised Academic Publishing (DAP) to improve the current system of scientific publishing. DAP will use blockchain technology to make research metadata read-only, secure and more visible. It will also use scientific tokens (Ergion) to reward reviewers, editors and authors. By using blockchain technology, DAP can offer faster and more efficient publishing processes, increase accessibility and reduce the potential for fraud. DAP will be a decentralised system managed by a community of users rather than a central authority and will use smart contracts to automate processes such as peer review services and increase transparency. Overall, the authors believe that DAP has the potential to significantly improve scientific peer review and knowledge dissemination by reducing review time and making the entire peer review system more transparent and reliable.

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Conflict of interest statement

No competing interests were disclosed.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Decentralised user-centred shell model of Decentralised Academic Publishing (DAP).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Decentralised Academic Publishing platform - a global overview.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Use case diagrams for different user roles.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.. Virtual Editor architecture.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.. Scholarly Wallet scheme.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.. The scheme of the Academic Success Ranking module.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.. Open Concurrent Review module concept.
Figure 8.
Figure 8.. An example of the integration of Decentralised Academic Publishing (DAP) into the existing publisher platforms.
Figure 9.
Figure 9.. Import of existing or creating a new wallet.
Figure 10.
Figure 10.. New seed phrase for the wallet.
Figure 11.
Figure 11.. Scholarly Wallet with 33 Ergions.
Figure 12.
Figure 12.. Transaction information on HashNET explorer.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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