Blockchain-Based Paper Review System

Paper review and publishing is an important part of a researcher’s life. It is where a researcher’s time and resources that he has spent bears fruit. And this is enabled by getting his work reviewed by different peers. In our current state of things, researchers face a lot of issues while they try to publish their research manuscript. These issues include quality of peer-reviews, rise of predatory journals, bias between reviewers, and other issues regarding academic integrity. These issues in the traditional system are what make the system inefficient. Therefore, we propose a more efficient blockchain-based system that will try to tackle these issues. Hyperledger Fabric is one of the most popular Blockchain platforms which provides a permissioned blockchain. Our proposed system would leverage the permissioned blockchain. This is to ensure that not everyone from outside the system has access to the data present in the system and only the members of the blockchain are able to access the data. The workflow of the peer-review system would be stored as transactions. The blockchain would be used to keep track of these transactions and order them properly in order to maintain provenance. This system would prove to be a lot more efficient than the traditional existing systems.