Tokenizing Peer-Review: The Why? The How? And the What?

“I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system." - Sydney Brenner CH FRS FMedSci MAE, 2002 Noble Laureate

Everyone in academia has experienced the peer-review crisis at some level and magnitude. Who hasn't waited for months to receive an unjustified rejection or poorly devised review report? Who hasn't come across biased and uneven peer-review favoring a specific paradigm or theory? For those who didn't, this 3 minutes video explains its essentials!

Researchers in science, technology and medicine (STM) publish more than 2.5 million peer-reviewed papers a year. Google scholar indexes somewhat over 160 million papers to date. The largest global peer-review survey revealed that researches spent 68.5 million hours on peer-review in 2017. This means that every year, there's more than 8,000 years of cumulative review-time are required!

Approximately 10% of the reviewers are responsible for 50% of the reviews. More than 70% of reviewers often decline peer-review requests because the article is outside their area of expertise while 42% of researchers decline review requests because they are too busy. Peer review is at large inefficient, too slow and most of the time obscured and in many situations is misguiding.

The $10 billion STM publishing industry is in indeed the pillar of science R&D in so many ways. Peer-reviewed publishing has no alternative to serve evidence-based science and the progress of collective human knowledge in all fields of knowledge governed by the scientific method.

The question posed by the peer-review crisis is a question of how to fix it, and what will it take to do so! It is never, in any way, a question of its necessity and vitality for the progress of science! After all, without peer-review what science is left to trust?!

To fix peer-review, the entire ecosystem should be democratized. The process must be smart, transparent, authenticated and rewarding for all stakeholders; from universities and funding institutions to authors, reviewers and editors and the scientific community at large. Peer-review, in short, needs to be reinvented.

Blockchain, particularly through tokenization, has the power to the resolve peer-review crisis intuitively and seamlessly. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized ledger to keep track-records of peer-review and offer solutions to copyright infringement, IP protection, plagiarism, citation analytics and conflict of interest. All these aspects related to peer-review are now being approached using non-standard protocols on conventional databases hosted by different publishers.

Tokenization offers a way to democratize peer-review and turn it to an incentive-driven protocol for all stakeholders: authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, universities and R&D funding institutions. However, since peer-reviewed publishing cycle involves numerous roles and scenarios, the use-case scenarios and tokenomics have to be carefully co-designed to ensure that the system always favors good scientific practices such as transparency, reproducibility, authenticity and fairness.

Incentivizing peer-review to improve speed and accuracy

Tokenization offers an incentivizing mechanism to reward reviewers for carrying out peer-review assignments quickly and accurately. Editors and copy-editors can also be rewarded for their roles in managing different stages of the review process in a way that favors publishing cycle efficiency.

Token Curated Registries (TCRs) to automate editorial policies

A token curated registry is merely a list in its simplest definition. Being part of the blockchain, a TCR is a maintained in a decentralized manner by token holders who have an incentive to do so. In a TCR-based peer-review system, the token holders (editors) have scientific incentive to maintain a high quality list which contains submitted paper that deserve to be peer-reviewed. In other words, TCRs can automate journal editorial policies and save thousands of hours wasted annually by editors to decide weather of not to review submitted manuscripts.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for IP and copyright protection

Each and every scholarly article is associated with some sort of intellectual property (IP) and copyright. NFTs provide an ideal toolset to protect IP and grant copyright license for peer-reviewed articles. The use of NFTs would not only resolve exhaustive and expensive IP conflicts often associated with early-stage research, but it will also let authors share the rewards of copyright licensing with publishers for the first time.

Are we going to see a tokenized peer-review system soon?

There have been a number of attempts to tokenize parts of the peer-review publishing cycle. These attempts include Principia Network, Decentralized science, and PaperScore. There is no complete solution that sets peer-review on a full-scale tokenization evolutionary path yet, and most probably it will not be there anytime soon. With the major players of the journal publishing industry being skeptical and conservative about the ground-breaking technology, a complete solution might carry enormous potential and sound risk making it a challenging achievement.