The Case for a Technology Solution to the Ethics Crisis in Academic Publishing

摘要

This article integrates existing theory from distributed computing and cryptology with gray literature from industry to provide a comprehensive description of the minimum requirements of a technological solution to the current ethics crisis in academic publishing. The paper argues that such a solution could significantly reduce the biases and misconduct that now exist in the academic peer review process. Theory suggests such a system could operate effectively as a distributed encrypted telecommunications network where nodes are anonymous, do not trust each other, with minimal central authority. To incentivize the academic community to join such a community, the paper proposes a new pseudo-cryptocurrency called litcoin (literature coin). This litcoin-based system would create economic scarcity based on proof of knowledge (POK), which is a synthesis of the proof of work (POW) mechanism used in bitcoin, and the proof of stake (POS) mechanism used in various altcoin communities.