Smart Papers: Dynamic Publications on the Blockchain

Abstract

Distributed Ledgers (DLs), also known as blockchains, provide decentralised, tamper-free registries of transactions among partners that distrust each other. For the scientific community, DLs have been proposed to decentralise and make more transparent each step of the scientific workflow. For the particular case of dissemination and peer-reviewing, DLs can provide the cornerstone to realise open decentralised publishing systems where social interactions between peers are tamper-free, enabling trustworthy computation of bibliometrics. In this paper, we propose the use of DL-backed smart contracts to track a subset of social interactions for scholarly publications in a decentralised and reliable way, yielding Smart Papers. We show how our Smart Papers approach complements current models for decentralised publishing, and analyse cost implications.