Ants-Review: a Protocol for Incentivized Open Peer-Reviews on Ethereum
This addresses the problem of inadequate recognition and compensation for peer-reviewers in academia, potentially benefiting researchers and journals, though it is an incremental application of blockchain technology to a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the lack of incentives in scientific peer-review by proposing Ants-Review, a blockchain-based system on Ethereum that rewards open anonymous peer-reviews with bounties and quality-based payments, aiming to improve timeliness, quality, and fairness in scientific dissemination.
Peer-review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher. Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality, and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that rewards scientists for peer-reviewing other scientists' work and that builds up trust and reputation. We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open anonymous peer-reviews on Ethereum. If requirements are met, peer-reviews will be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality. To promote ethical behavior and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified mechanism that allows the whole community to evaluate the peer-reviews and vote for the best ones.