Peer Review as Structured Commentary: Immutable Identity, Public Dialogue, and Reproducible Scholarship
This addresses the problem of slow, opaque academic validation for researchers across fields, offering a novel framework but is incremental in reimagining existing processes.
The paper tackles the inefficiencies of traditional peer review by proposing a transparent, identity-linked system using blockchain and AI to create structured public commentary, aiming to enhance scholarly validation and reproducibility.
This paper reconceptualises peer review as structured public commentary. Traditional academic validation is hindered by anonymity, latency, and gatekeeping. We propose a transparent, identity-linked, and reproducible system of scholarly evaluation anchored in open commentary. Leveraging blockchain for immutable audit trails and AI for iterative synthesis, we design a framework that incentivises intellectual contribution, captures epistemic evolution, and enables traceable reputational dynamics. This model empowers fields from computational science to the humanities, reframing academic knowledge as a living process rather than a static credential.