Purpose

Preprint has become an important vehicle for academic communications and discussions. However, in preprint, there is a lack of a sufficient quality control mechanism such as peer review, which is a proven quality assurance practice that is used in traditional academic publishing services. To address the problem leveraging on the power of this practice, the authors introduce into preprint a self-organizing peer review method by applying the concept of token economy and the blockchain technology.

Design/methodology/approach

Specifically, this paper proposes an idea that applies the token economy concept to the design of the incentive and penalty mechanisms for peer reviewers in preprint to assure the qualities of its publications. Steemit has been studied to demonstrate the characteristics of the mechanisms.

Findings

A token economy-enhanced framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint is also proposed. The resulting preprint system is an academic community-oriented, self-organizing and blockchain-based content publishing system that is designed to run on both permissioned and permissionless blockchains.

Research limitations/implications

First, since peer review is on a voluntary basis and not profits oriented, the “monetary” incentive and penalty mechanisms borrowed from Steemit may conflict with academic ethics. Second, the authors proposed to deploy the authors’ token economy on blockchain, but the current mainstream decentralized blockchain services are too few to warrant a foreseeable successful future for the authors’ application. In fact, as the flagship of blockchain 2.0, the Ethereum blockchain suffers from the problem of scalability, which leads to its applications' lower performances, longer response times and eventually more negative user experiences as time goes by. Finally, the authors’ proposed version of preprint has not been implemented, and hence, its practical effectiveness and acceptance by academia are yet to be evaluated.

Practical implications

In this paper, the authors proposed a token economy-based framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint leveraging on blockchain technology. This framework encourages positive interactions between authors and reviewers, which helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces more contents with better qualities. Application of a solution based on the authors’ framework should impact the current academic communities by offering a new academic peer reviewing tool that has a built-in mechanism for self-behavior correction and quality assurance.

Social implications

Through adaption, the framework can be applied to other domains as well. In such domains, a large amount of feedbacks from partakers are needed and there exists a tremendous amount of work to filter noises in feedbacks so as to ensure that as many the quality ones as possible are delivered for a variety of purposes. The authors’ framework essentially impacts almost all domains where there exists a need to collect and filter large amount of feedbacks, and using the authors’ framework-based solution is cost-saving, which can be seen as a major potential contribution of the research.

Originality/value

The incentive and penalty mechanisms encourage positive interactions between authors and reviewers, and it helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces high-volume contents with good qualities.

中文翻译：

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一种基于激励机制的框架，以确保预印本中自组织同行评审的质量

目的

预印本已成为学术交流和讨论的重要工具。然而，在预印本中，缺乏足够的质量控制机制，例如同行评审，这是传统学术出版服务中使用的一种行之有效的质量保证实践。为了利用这种实践的力量解决这个问题，作者应用通证经济的概念和区块链技术，在预印本中引入了一种自组织的同行评审方法。

设计/方法/方法

具体而言，本文提出了一种想法，将通证经济概念应用于预印本同行评审的激励和惩罚机制的设计，以确保其出版物的质量。Steemit 已被研究以证明机制的特征。

发现

还提出了一种用于预印本中自组织同行评审的代币经济增强框架。由此产生的预印系统是一个面向学术社区、自组织和基于区块链的内容发布系统，旨在在许可和非许可区块链上运行。

研究限制/影响

首先，由于同行评审是自愿的，而不是以利润为导向的，从 Steemit 借用的“货币”激励和惩罚机制可能会与学术道德发生冲突。其次，作者提出将作者的代币经济部署在区块链上，但目前主流的去中心化区块链服务太少，无法保证作者的应用在可预见的未来成功。事实上，作为区块链 2.0 的旗舰，以太坊区块链存在可扩展性问题，导致其应用性能较低，响应时间较长，最终随着时间的推移，用户体验会越来越差。最后，作者提出的预印本版本尚未实施，因此其实际有效性和学术界的接受程度还有待评估。

实际影响

在本文中，作者提出了一种基于代币经济的框架，用于利用区块链技术在预印本中进行自组织同行评审。该框架鼓励作者和审稿人之间的良性互动，有助于建立健康的学术生态，产出更多质量更好的内容。基于作者框架的解决方案的应用应该通过提供一种新的学术同行评审工具来影响当前的学术界，该工具具有内置的自我行为纠正和质量保证机制。

社会影响

通过适应，该框架也可以应用于其他领域。在这样的领域中，需要来自参与者的大量反馈，并且存在大量工作来过滤反馈中的噪声以确保尽可能多地提供高质量的反馈用于各种目的。作者的框架基本上影响了几乎所有需要收集和过滤大量反馈的领域，并且使用作者基于框架的解决方案可以节省成本，这可以看作是研究的主要潜在贡献。

原创性/价值

激励和惩罚机制鼓励作者和审稿人之间的良性互动，有助于建立健康的学术生态，产生大量高质量的内容。