Peer Review¶

BLIP:	3
Title:	Peer Review
Owner(s):
Author(s):	Antonio Tenorio Fornés (antonio@decentralized.science), Kaan Uzdogan (uzdogan@mpdl.mpg.de), Paulo Colombo (pcolombo@ucm.es), Elena Pérez Tirador (elena@decentralized.science), Kevin Wittek (wittek@internet-sicherheit.de), Sebastian Müller (sebastian.mueller@flexdapps.com), James Lawton (lawton@mpdl.mpg.de)
Status:
Created:	2020-06-09
License:	BSD-2-Clause

Motivation¶

This document proposes an standard for the registration of peer reviews on the Bloxberg's blockchain. At bloxberg's bloeckchain ecosystem, there are currently several applications and projects that register peer reviews, such as Bloxberg's peer-review-app, Decentralized Science, or peerMiles project. An agreement of how to record these peer reviews would benefit Bloxberg's applications ecosystem, enabling interoperability among them.

List of blochain projects registering peer reviews¶

Following, we list the blockchain projects that could benefit from this standard

Projects actively contributing to the definition of the standard¶

Other active blockchain projects with interest in peer reviewing¶

Orvium

Standard Peer Review registries¶

Currently, our reference implementation peer-review-app is registering many fields of a peer review such as the review author, or the ID of the reviewed article.

This standard should specify which fields to register in every record, the format and standards those fields should adopt, which are mandatory among others.

Peer Review Records' fields¶

[name=Paulo] What is the id field and why do we need it ?

Field	data type	Format/s	Mandatory	Comments
id	string	IPFS Hash??	Yes	The id should be unique. How to make sure reviews are unique? See Zooko's triangle for a relevant discussion on the compromises between decentralization, human usability and unique identifiers
doi
timestamp	uint32	unix timestamp	Yes
author	address		Yes
journalId	string	ISSN	Yes
publisher	string	Name?	Yes
manuscriptId	string	DOI	Yes	See isReviewOf relationship of Crossref.
manuscriptHash	string	IPFS	Yes
recommendation	enum (TODO: See other standards such as Orcid, Publons...)		Yes
url	string		Yes	The url should give public access to the content of the review. Alternativelly, it can be a IPFS address so the content is served from a decentralized network
endorsers	address[]		Yes
endorsersMap	mapping(address => bool)		Yes
stage	enum	Values: pre-publication, post-publication	Optional	Defined at Crossref peer review stage schema
type	enum	Values: referee-report, editor-report, author-comment, community-comment, manuscript, aggregate, recommendation	Optional	Defined at Crossref peer review type schema
revision-round	int		Yes	Defined at Crossref peer review revision-round schema
competing_interest_statement	string
institution
titles
license_data

TODO Decide which field could be private. For instance, the review content could be publicly shared or not depending on the reviewer's preferences.

Existing standards (industry / de-facto / formalized)¶

TODO Write a collection of existing standards: Crossref, Orcid, Publons, https://casrai.org/ (ORCid uses casrai, they are preparing a ISO standard on that standard proposal), etc.
Orcid: https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006971333-Peer-Review
Crossref: https://www.crossref.org/education/content-registration/recommendations-by-content-type/peer-reviews/

Functions and Permissions¶

Function name	description	parameters	permission	Comment
addReview	add a review to the system	author, journalId, publisher, manuscriptId, ManuscriptHash, recommendation, url	reviewers can add reviews to their profile. TODO: consider other authorized actors such as journals or review registering services (Publons, Orcid,...)
addMultipleReviews	add multiple reviews to the system	ids, journalIds, publishers, manuscriptIds, manuscriptHashes, timestamps, recommendations, urls	reviewers can add multiple reviews to their profile at once
deleteReview	delete a review from the system	id	reviews can be deleted by the author only
endorseReview	endorse a review	address, id	reviews can be endorse by others only
addEndorser	add an endorser address	address, name?	endorser address	How should endorsers share with the network how they verify reviews? different approaches from different actors should be supported.

Decentralized Endorsements for Review Validity¶

We should allow other reviewers and third parties to endorse for the validity of reviews registered at the system.

Different actors can have different strategies to verify a review. These actors can register their addresses as endorsers, and register a URL explaining how they validate the reviews. For instance, Bloxberg peer-review-app can verify at their servers that a review comes from Publons, and have an address that endorses after this verification is done.

How to bring trust to public endorsers¶

As a decentralized application where we would allow different endorsers. Users, applications and other actors should decide which endorsers to trust. A system where users could vote up or down specific endorser's addresses could help to build trust in such addresses. Also, we could use the more advanced Token Curated Registries as a decentralized reputation system for endorses identities.