Self-sovereign identity for verifiable authorship consent and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening in academic publishing: a permissioned blockchain registry approach

Abstract

Introduction – Academic publishing, a cornerstone of knowledge dissemination and scientific advancement, increasingly faces ethical threats such as unconsented authorship, gift authorship, author ambiguity, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. Although infrastructures such as ORCID support researcher identity disambiguation, they do not adequately enforce explicit authorship consent, verify contributor roles, or enable privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening during peer review. Methods – This study proposes a standards-aligned decentralized conceptual framework for ethical authorship validation. The framework integrates Self-Sovereign Identity, Decentralized Identifiers, and Verifiable Credentials to capture explicit co-author consent as verifiable events, embed verified authorship metadata in publications, and support privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest checks through zero-knowledge techniques. A permissioned ledger functions as a trust registry for hashes and status indicators, without storing personally identifiable information on-chain, and supports revocation. To assess the relevance of the proposed design, a stakeholder survey was conducted with researchers, editors, and reviewers. Results – The proposed framework addresses key gaps in existing scholarly identity and publishing infrastructures by introducing mechanisms for verifiable authorship consent, contributor-role validation, and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening. Survey findings indicate strong stakeholder support for both consent enforcement and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest checks. Discussion – This work contributes a conceptual design for strengthening trust, accountability, and transparency in academic publishing through decentralized identity and verifiable credential technologies. The findings provide formative empirical support for future prototyping and evaluation.