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.

中文翻译：

---

Open-Pub：基于区块链的透明且隐私保护的学术出版系统

最新研究成果的学术发表对于促进所有学科的发展至关重要。然而，当前的学术出版系统存在许多严重的缺陷。第一个问题是由于论文审查过程不透明导致发表过程中的不当行为。匿名审稿人可能会在没有被注意到或惩罚的情况下对论文发表有偏见的评论，因为评论很少发表以供评估。其次，论文审查过程中作者的匿名性很容易受到损害，因为这些信息只是对会议主席或期刊编辑开放。最后但并非最不重要的一点是，研究论文的访问权限仅限于订阅者，甚至作者也无法访问自己的论文。在本文中，我们提出了 Open-Pub，一个去中心化的、使用区块链技术的透明且保护隐私的学术出版计划，旨在减少学术不端行为并促进研究成果的免费共享。为此，我们设计了一个阈值组签名来实现审稿人和作者的匿名。有了这个组签名，作者可以选择匿名提交论文，验证者根据他们的研究兴趣轮流将论文匿名分发给区块链上的审稿人。审稿人提交审稿意见后，将公开审稿人和匿名作者的身份。这些过程都会被记录在区块链上，以便每个人都可以追踪整个过程。为了评估其效率，我们实现了基于以太坊源代码的 Open-Pub 并进行了全面的实验来评估其性能，包括计算成本和处理延迟。实验结果表明，Open-Pub 在计算和处理匿名交易方面具有很高的效率。