A Novel Blockchain-Based Scientific Publishing System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper reviews the existing scientific publishing system and proposes to use blockchain technology to improve the process. While the research article is of interest and tries to present a system that can resolve the issues being faced by researchers and publication houses but there are many contradictions and wrong assumptions:

1.       In related work section 2.1.1, the articles discuss the traditional publishing system and highlight the challenges and problems of conventional publishing systems. How the blockchain-based system will resolve these challenges has not been discussed. Also, challenges like difficulty finding an appropriate journal are not relevant and what will be the role of blockchain in finding a suitable journal? In many cases, no rewards for the authors and contributors can be justified, but it has nothing to do with the blockchain-based or standard journal submission systems. It has to be decided by the journal publishers.

2.       Biasness and delays in the review process can be easily resolved in the traditional journal submission systems by automating the reviewer allocation or providing a pool of reviewers to the editor. Still, the major issue in this process is that reviewers do not agree or, if they agree to review, take much time to review because they often feel they are not getting enough return for their services. Even if you make it a blockchain-based system, reviewer issues can be the same if you do not provide them with any benefits.

3.       Table 1 provides a comparison of traditional versus blockchain-based scientific publishing systems is a very botched comparison and cannot be accepted as a generalised view. Provide the reasoning in the table or text about how the authors reached this conclusion.

4.       Section 2.3, supposed to evaluate the State-of-the-art in Blockchain-Based Scientific Publishing Methods, is vague and written without any evidence or reference. Ideally, the authors should have provided their review in the form of a table and provided specific comment on which proposed model or framework lack in which aspect. Then further justify how their proposed model can resolve the issues instead of comparing their own model with traditional models and rejecting the existing blockchain-based models on flimsy grounds without any justification or reference.

5.       Most of the issues raised in the article about traditional publishing systems can be resolved using the existing submission sys. Still, it depends upon the policy of the publishers. Even if the blockchain-based system is implemented and publishing houses do not agree to share the rewards with editors and reviewers, these issues will continue.

6.       Discussion about traditional systems is ok for background study, but the proposed framework cannot be compared with these systems. To improve the article, the authors should mainly focus on the existing research works on blockchain-based research publication systems, highlight their weaknesses and justify how your proposed model can resolve those issues that will be a novelty of this work. Based on this comparison, the result and discussion section should be updated.

 

Author Response

We would like to thank you for valuable comments. The article has been improved and changed have been made in line with the comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper designs a blockchain-based scientific publishing system. There are some issues with the paper:

1. It is better if the abstract could point out the deficiencies of the existing works and explain the basic rationale of the proposed method.

2. The paper should list and summarize the pros and cons of the existing blockchain based publishing systems.

3. When the journal selects reviewers for an article, the reviewers may not be available. How do you solve this problem?

4. How does the proposed system solve the problem of biased review process?

5. The editor is responsible to select the reviewers and checking the quality of the review. In some sense, the editor is a centralized point.

6. It is not clear how the proposed method can reduce the publication time and cost, since all the traditional review processing steps are included in the system.

7. The evaluation of the designed system is missing. The comparison study is missing.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for valuable comments. The article has been improved and changed have been made in line with the comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

From my point of view, the manuscript does not rise to the high scientific level of the journal and therefore I believe that it should be improved and resubmitted to the journal.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for valuable comments. The article has been improved and changed have been made in line with the comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Overall, the paper is interesting and nicely written. However, I have some remarks which state below: 

1. Introduction must be improved because from the available text it is unclear which specific problem this aims to address. The introductory section list a number of challenges which covers the scientific journal publication process holistically, but the paper fails to clearly specifies which of the listed challenges the problem Blockchain-based system is addressing. 

2. The review of existing literature has been reported but the analysis is very superficial. Literature section appears to be more like an annotated bibliography than the critical analysis of the literature pointing to specific gaps and challenges the need immediate attention in the SJP space. Furthermore, I got the impression that more you read the contents of this section more you get confused that what is the objective of this literature review and how it informed the research questions being addressed. I couldn't find the hook and the gaps in the literature. I strongly recommend revisiting the literature review section and tighten up it to state clearly the research gaps and underpin how the literature directed the development of the problem SJP system. 

3. Section 3 introduces the architecture and front-end and back-end components of the proposed SJP system implemented and it seem reasonably written. However, what I see the critical gap in this section - is the evaluation of the implemented system. I strongly encourage the author to empirically the system and report back their finding on the efficacy. Without such evaluation, the contribution of the implemented system will be very limited. 

4. Discussion and conclusion section also need attention to discuss clearly the learnings from this exercise and how the developed system will or have overcome the challenges / technical research gaps. 

Other concerns: 

The language of the paper should be improved as at places it difficult to understand what is going on. I strongly recommend author revisit the article and improve the formality and expression of the paper.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for valuable comments. The article has been improved and changed have been made in line with the comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised manuscript has not been updated as per the review comments. Comments have not been appropriately incorporated or justification for not incorporating the suggestions has been provided. For example:

1.       In response to review comments, the authors claim that “we updated the related work section 2.1.1. Furthermore, the role of the blockchain system over the traditional publication system has been explained more clearly.” But there is no change in the new version compared to the old version.

2.       In response to review comments, the authors claim that “Table 1 is updated, and the explanation is given.”. Still, no change in Table 1 and changes made in the explanation before table 1 are very superficial, and just some rephrasing has been done. How have the authors come to a conclusion and write the contents in Table 1, which have not been cited? It is their own view without any justification.

3.       In response to the comments, “Section 2.3, supposed to evaluate the State-of-the-art in Blockchain-Based Scientific Publishing Methods, is vague and written without any evidence or reference”, the authors have provided and added some references. However, still, it has not been explained in detail, and no tabular representation is provided. The explanations provided are still very brief and not satisfactory. Also, the review provided by the authors is not up to date. For example, the following articles related to the research work have not been considered in sections 2.2 and 2.3 while evaluating the current state of art.

·      Daraghmi, Eman-Yaser, Mamoun Abu Helou, and Yousef-Awwad Daraghmi. "A blockchain-based editorial management system." Security and Communication Networks 2021 (2021): 1-17.

·      Wang, Taotao, Soung Chang Liew, and Shengli Zhang. "Pubchain: A decentralized open-access publication platform with participants incentivized by blockchain technology." 2020 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC). IEEE, 2020.

·      Dadkhah, Mehdi, et al. "Jourchain: using blockchain to avoid questionable journals." Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971-) 191.3 (2022): 1435-1439.

·      Tanwar, Sudeep. "Impact of Blockchain on Academic Publishing." Blockchain Technology: From Theory to Practice. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2022. 385-408.

·      Choi, Dong-Hoon, and Tae-Sul Seo. "Development of an open peer review system using blockchain and reviewer recommendation technologies." science editing 8.1 (2021): 104.  

4.       In response to the comments, “Discussion about traditional systems is ok for background study, but the proposed framework cannot be compared with these systems. To improve the article, the authors should mainly focus on the existing research works on blockchain-based research publication systems, highlight their weaknesses and justify how your proposed model can resolve those issues that will be a novelty of this work. Based on this comparison, the result and discussion section should be updated.” The authors have not explained what changes have been made, and the reply is a general one. The proposed framework novelty cannot be justified without justifying and comparing your model/ system with existing works.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Necessary improvements were made in line with your suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I have no other concerns.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Necessary improvements were made in line with your suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In this paper, the authors propose a decentralized blockchain-based scientific publication platform to eliminate the traditional publication system deficiencies, using Ethereum smart contracts to accelerate the publication process and abate the biased evaluation process while reducing the publication cost. The authors claim that their model improves the quality of scientific studies by adding new features to the publication process and increases the number of publishers, makes the publication process fully traceable, and makes scientific papers globally available to anyone with a small fee. Although the paper falls into the topics of the journal, there are minor issues to be solved by the authors:

Section 1. Introduction- the authors should introduce more references linked to the specific subject of the paper, especially from MDPI journals.

Section 2. Related work. Figure 2- the authors should made minor spell check: “reguest“, “publicaiton“ etc.

Section 3. Proposed Method- It is a misconception that journals rates are high. In fact, most of Q1 and Q2 journals do not charge publication/review fees.

Section 5. Limitation of the Proposed Method - I think that some more words should be spent for future research avenues.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Necessary improvements were made in line with your suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors have addressed my remarks previously provided in my review. The manuscript has now reached to an acceptable level for publication. 

 

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Necessary improvements were made in line with your suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have sufficiently improved the article in line with review comments and can be considered for publication.