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

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 Decentralised Academic Publishing (DAP), 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.