PubChain: A Decentralized Open-Access Publication Platform with Participants Incentivized by Blockchain Technology

Abstract

We design and implement Publication Chain (PubChain), a decentralized open-access publication platform built on decentralized and distributed technologies of blockchain and IPFS peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The existing publication platforms are mostly owned by publishers with profit as their central goal. Instead of promoting widespread knowledge sharing, access to publications on these platforms is often on a fee basis. The stakeholders (the people who are doing the real work), including the authors, reviewers, and readers, do not derive financial gain, from these platforms. Indeed, authors sometimes have to pay exorbitant page charges to have their papers published, and readers have to pay membership fee or other fees to access the papers. On these platforms, you have to pay before you are allowed to stand on the shoulders of giants; but the giants do not get paid, neither do the gate-keepers (the reviewer). PubChain is a decentralized publication platform, where the ownerships of the published papers, reviews, and comments on the papers, belong to the authors, readers and reviewers, rather than a central third party that exploits the free services and contributions of others. On PubChain, key stakeholders are incentivized to participate in a meaningful and substantive manner by earning credits and rewards through self-motivated interactions. Pubchain makes use of blockchain technology to set up an incentive scheme to encourage participations by authors, readers and reviewers. No central party owns Pubchain (just like nobody owns the Bitcoin blockchain). We have implemented a prototype of PubChain to demonstrate its key concepts.