A Blockchain-Based Editorial Management System

Abstract

Research publications are reaching a stunning growth rate. Therefore, new challenges regarding managing the peer-review activities are presented, such as data security, privacy, integrity, fragmentation, and isolation. Further, because of the emergence of predatory journals and research fraud, there is a need to assess the quality of the peer-review process. This research proposes a fully functional blockchain-based editorial management system, namely, TimedChain, for managing the peer-review process from submission to publication. TimedChain provides secure, interoperable, transparent, and efficient access to manuscripts by publishers, authors, readers, and other third parties. Time-based smart contracts and advanced encryption techniques are employed for governing transactions, controlling access, and providing further security. An incentive mechanism that evaluates publishers’ value respecting their efforts at managing and maintaining research data and creating new blocks is introduced. Extensive experiments were conducted for performance evaluation. Results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system in governing a large set of data at low latency.