Decentralized Peer-Review Research Solution

The current conference and journal management systems for scientific research are centralized and suffer from single-point-of-failures. Moreover, these systems lack transparency and require their participants to trust a third-party. In this paper, we design a decentralized alternative for conference and journal management systems by leveraging decentralized technologies like blockchain and IPFS. We conceptualized a blockchain-based portal for sharing research articles with organizers of a scientific research publication venue. Additionally, we implement symmetric key encryption of research articles using a data encryption key to ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of intellectual property. A novel contribution of this research work is the design of a secure approach to storing conflict of interests information and, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation of the author's conflict of interests. This solution has been prototyped and analyzed for overall cost-effectiveness and the results show that an organizer incurs an estimated expense of up to $300 for hosting a conference (considering 200 submissions and 2 peer-reviewers assigned to each submission). The authors and reviewers also incur transaction costs estimated at $1.54 and $0.56 for each submission and review, respectively. Additionally, the core concept of our solution can be applied to other use cases where confidential document sharing in a trustless environment is desirable, like patent applications and grant applications.