Academic publication of latest research results are crucial to advance development of all disciplines. However, there are a number of severe disadvantages in current academic publication systems. The first problem is the misconduct during the publication process due to the opaque paper review process. An anonymous reviewer may give biased comments to a paper without being noticed or punished, because the comments are seldom published for evaluation. Secondly, the author anonymity during the paper review process is easily compromised since this information is simply open to the conference chair or the journal editor. Last but not least, access to research papers is restricted to only subscribers, and even the authors cannot access their own papers. In this paper, we propose Open-Pub, a decentralized, transparent yet privacy-preserving academic publication scheme using the blockchain technology, aiming to reduce academic misconducts and promote free sharing of research results. To this end, we design a threshold group signature to achieve anonymity for reviewers and authors. With this group signature, authors can choose to submit papers anonymously and validators take turns to distribute papers anonymously to reviewers on the blockchain according to their research interests. After the reviewers submit their review comments, the identities of reviewers and anonymous authors will be disclosed. These processes will be recorded on the blockchain so that everyone can trace the entire process. To evaluate its efficiency, we implement Open-Pub based on Ethereum source code and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate its performance, including computation cost and processing delay. The experiment results show that Open-Pub is highly efficient in computation and processing anonymous transactions.
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