Rethinking Academic Journals: Decentralized blockchain-based peer-reviewed article

Pain Point

One of the most important criteria researchers are measured upon is how much they have published in peer-reviewed journals.
This peer-review process starts with them sending their article to journals. The articles then are reviewed by different researchers for free, sometimes anonymously. After the review and feedback, the researchers can resubmit an updated version of the article. After the article is accepted and published, which might take some time, the journals often restrict access to the article behind a paywall. As an answer, many researchers do publish their article online or on sites like ResearchGate but nonetheless, a lot of knowledge is hidden from the public. This is one of the reasons, why there is rising criticism about this procedure. It is seen to be lengthy, disadvantages women, and there is no assurance of the neutrality or quality of the reviewers. Moreover, most of the research is publicly funded and should, therefore, be publicly accessible.

Solution

A solution could be a blockchain-based platform for peer-reviewed articles. The first step is that researchers upload their articles and link their possible co-authors. This means that from the beginning authorship can be retraced. The articles could also be signed by universities or research institutes.
On a next step, these articles then get peer-reviewed by reviewers who get paid based on the quality of their review or they can earn a "Science-Coin" which they can spend for reviews of their own article.
Reviewers can remain anonym but their review is accessible and rateable for everybody. This probably motivates them to write a good and fair review. On top, a discrimination because of gender, race, or scientific rivalery are reduced when the article are uploaded under a psydonym and key which was hashed with the original name.
Because of the reduced costs, new journals could arise allow for competition.

In the next step, this process could also be expanded to the area of newspapers. The blockchain allows for decentralized storage which makes it almost impossible to delete certain information.

Thank you for reading my post! #LifeWithBlockchain

Special thanks to Pascal Mehrwald (@pascalmehrwald), Benjamin Pabst von Ohain (@benpvo), and Prof. Dr. Isabell M. Welpe for offering a course on blockchain at the TUM and inspiration for all the ideas.