Blockchain Meets Scientific Reviews

Photo by Goran Ivos on Unsplash

It is no secret that the current peer-review system in science has many critics, and for many reasons. One of them is the fact that journals reap most of the benefit of publication, all the while authors are required to pay for submissions or readers for access, and reviewers are not compensated for their work. Another is the large gap between the quality of the peer-review process for different scientific papers. Some (including us) have suggested that emerging technologies, such as blockchain, can provide a much-needed solution to this problem by enhancing transparency, accountability and accessibility to scientific content, including reviews.

Here we propose a prototype, tested on the Cardano blockchain, for a treasury system governed by smart-contracts that allow the release of funds to reviewers when an article is successfully published.

Description of the contract

The rules of the contract are simple:

• The treasury is filled by sending ADA to the contract’s address.
• Funds are released if and only if an article is published.
• A master account needs to sign the transaction for the release of funds.
• As a security measure, payments are capped at a certain amount.
• A highly secured root account can bypass this limit (e.g., transferring to a new contract).

Some definitions

• ADA: Cardano’s native currency
• Master account: A platform/journal’s address that signals an article’s publication.
• Root account: An air-gapped account for transferring funds to a new script address.

Caveats

• Having a master or root account introduces a layer of centralization and trust. In the future, one can envision a system that is governed by a multi-signature wallet for distributing the responsibility to a pre-determined list of trusted participants.
• Capping the payments to a certain amount might be by-passed by a single transaction with a multitude of recipient addresses. This can be mitigated by limiting the transaction outputs of a single transaction (a v2 version of the script described below will be implementing this functionality).

Test-case example

Here is a script address on the Cardano Preview testnet that implements all the rules and limitations described above, with the payment capping set at 500,000,000 lovelace, or 500 ADA per payment output. This is equivalent to 125–130 USD at the time of writing this article. Note that this amount is simply given as an example and will be adjusted based on a market-fit study before launching on mainnet.

This script address currently has 4 transactions:

1. Filling the treasury with 100 tADA (from the master account’s address).
2. Paying a hypothetical reviewer 100 tADA minus fees and signing with the master account.
3. Re-filling the treasury 100 tADA (from the master account’s address).
4. Emptying the treasury with all the funds going back to master, and signed by root.

What we’ve just described is a simple prototype showcasing how we can:

1. Setup an incentive structure for reviewing scientific articles.
2. Lock funds in a treasury with a pre-condition for release.
3. Implement a post-publishing trigger mechanism for paying reviewers their due.

Future steps

The next step is to discover and implement enhancements to this contract, some of which were already discussed in the ‘Caveats’ section, extensively test the module and integrate it with PubWeave so that the trigger mechanism can happen through the UI.

And that’s a wrap. If you would like more information on what we do, or would like to contribute, send us an email at info@intellart.ca and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.