A Blockchain-based File-sharing System for Academic Paper Review

As a tool for human technological advancement, the peer-review system acts as a gateway for ensuring academic paper qualities. However, the system has proven to be slow and expensive. Also, biasedness remains an unsolved problem. Such issues could become a major bottleneck, which can adversely impact research progress and dissemination of knowledge. This paper aims to propose a double-blind paper review system to preserve the authors and reviewers anonymity. This system also addresses issues concerning the reviewers payment, inconsistent review metrics, and biased reviews. The proposed solution utilizes the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The blockchain smart contracts provide a base for financial transactions between paper publishers and the reviewers. Hence, we introduce AcadCoin, a novel cryptocurrency used for supporting said financial transactions. Also, the Hyperledger blockchain provides user access control to achieve double-blindness in reviews. Along with the Hyperledger blockchain, the IPFS is used to store the paper documents, review documents and open metrics documents to reduce the storage requirement of the blockchain. A broad system architecture is constructed to combine the blockchain and the file storage system. This system architecture distributes nodes of the system to related parties. Finally, the blockchain network is implemented and tested using the Hyperledger Composer Playground environment.