No abstract

Distributed Ledgers (DLs), also known as blockchains, provide decentralised, tamper-free registries of transactions among partners that distrust each other. For the scientific community, DLs have been proposed to decentralise and make more transparent each step of the scientific workflow. For the particular case of dissemination and peerreviewing, DLs can provide the cornerstone to realise open decentralised publishing systems where social interactions between peers are tamperfree, enabling trustworthy computation of bibliometrics. In this paper, we propose the use of DL-backed smart contracts to track a subset of social interactions for scholarly publications in a decentralised and reliable way, yielding Smart Papers. We show how our Smart Papers approach complements current models for decentralised publishing, and analyse cost implications.

Blockchains provide decentralised, tamper-free registries of transactions among partners that may not trust each other. For the scientific community, blockchain smart contracts have been proposed to decentralise and make more transparent multiple aspects of scholarly communications. We show how an Ethereum-based suite of smart contracts running on top of a Web-enabled governance framework can facilitate decentralised computation of citations that is trustworthy. We implement and evaluate Smart Papers, and extend it with a model for decentralised citation counts. We show how our approach complements current models for decentralised publishing and informetrics calculation, and analyse cost and performance implications.

This work analyses blockchain-mediated decentralization based on a systematic review of the scholarly understanding of the term 'decentralization' across multiple disciplines from computer to political sciences, examining how its various meanings are reflected in popular discourse on blockchains and distributed ledgers. The paper aims to capture the rigorous cross-domain understanding of decentralization and its most important features, and to map the commonalities and differences between it and some closely related concepts such as distribution, disintermediation and peer-topeer (P2P). Across all domains, decentralization appears to be used as a solution to problems requiring non-trivial coordination across heterogeneous stakeholders. Blockchain-mediated decentralization appears to have unique characteristics reflecting an idiosyncratic set of authority-related values prevalent in so-called "crypto" online communities. Within blockchain space, the article argues against the binary positioning of "decentralization" and "centralization," proposing a dialectical approach and arguing that a system's authority allocation is a quality positioned on a spectrum between purely decentralized and completely centralized, noting how a blockchain setup could simultaneously both have facets that are significantly centralized and others that are not. The authors document their systematic review findings and propose a framework for understanding blockchain-mediated decentralization, suggesting a definition, and outlining new directions for further human-centric research into distributed ledger technologies and for designing decentralized ecosystems.