PubChain: A Decentralized Open-Access Publication Platform with Participants Incentivized by Blockchain Technology

TL;DR

PubChain is a blockchain-based decentralized platform for open-access academic publishing that incentivizes authors, reviewers, and readers through a reward system, aiming to improve knowledge sharing and review quality.

Contribution

The paper introduces PubChain, a novel blockchain and IPFS-based platform with an incentive scheme to enhance participation and review quality in open-access publishing.

Findings

Prototype implementation demonstrating key concepts

Simulations showing robustness against fraud

Incentive scheme effectively motivates stakeholders

Abstract

We design and implement Publication Chain (PubChain), a decentralized open-access publication platform built on decentralized and distributed technologies of blockchain and IPFS peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The existing publication platforms have some severe drawbacks. First, instead of promoting widespread knowledge sharing, access to publications on the platforms owned by publishers is often on a fee basis. This drawback of pay wall prevents researchers from "standing on the shoulders of giants". Moreover, the peer review process on most all existing publication platforms (including both open-access and publisher platforms) is prone to be ineffective, since there is no proper incentive to reviewers for performing high-qualified reviews. PubChain is an alternative platform to the existing publication venues aiming to address their drawbacks. No central third-party owns the contents (i.e., papers and reviews) of PubChain. Exploiting blockchain technology, we devise an elaborate incentive scheme on PubChain to incentivize key stakeholders (i.e., authors, readers and reviewers) to participate publication activities on PubChain in a substantive manner by earning credits and rewards through self-motivated interactions. We have performed simulations to investigate the robustness of our proposed incentive scheme against fraudulent publications and reviews. We also have implemented a prototype of PubChain to demonstrate its key concepts.