Scientific Paper Peer-Reviewing System With Blockchain, IPFS, and Smart Contract

Existing Peer Reviewing System, Drawbacks And Challenges

It is assumed that the first peer- reviewing process was archived in a book named “Ethics of the Physician”, written by a Syrian physician, Ishap bin Ali Al Rahwi (CE 854–931). Back then, other physicians used peer-reviewing on a given prescription to the patients to see if they are being treated according to the standards (Spier, 2002) or not. The idea of peer-reviewing was started from here. Later, many media, and literature societies started practicing the peer-reviewing system for their own development and improvement of knowledge. The societies submitted their works to the committee where the committee reviewed papers, accepted or recommended for any changes (kronick, 1990). In 1731, the Royal Society of Edinburgh instigated the peer-review system in Scholarly publication with a bunch of peer-reviewed medical papers. But the publication of articles was decided almost 100 years later after (Shema, 2014). In 1831, William Whewell of royal society of London proposed the Proceeding of the Royal Society where the new papers were included. That’s where the real peer-reviewing was started (INFOGRAPHIC). At first, the single blind review was adopted, where the reviewer was anonymous, but the author name was known to the reviewer. This process was garbage as the papers were not well reviewed and most of the time the reviewer was biased (Csiszar, 2016). “Editor plus two referees system” became quite popular among the scholars for peer-reviewing. Then “Double-blind” peer-reviewing was adopted to avoid bias (Rowland, 2002). This process is now used to review most of the scientific papers with some updates which will be discussed later.