  Academic publications of latest research results are crucial to advance the
development of all disciplines. However, there are several severe disadvantages
in current academic publication systems. The first 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 because the
comments are seldom published for evaluation. Second, access to research papers
is restricted to only subscribers, and even the authors cannot access their own
papers. To address the above problems, we propose Open-Pub, a decentralized,
transparent yet privacy-preserving academic publication scheme using the
blockchain technology. In Open-Pub, we first design a threshold identity-based
group signature (TIBGS) that protects identities of signers using verifiable
secret sharing. Then we develop a strong double-blind mechanism to protect the
identities of authors and reviewers. With this strong double-blind mechanism,
authors can choose to submit papers anonymously, and validators distribute
papers anonymously to reviewers on the blockchain according to their research
interests. This process is publicly recorded and traceable on the blockchain so
as to realize transparent peer preview. To evaluate its efficiency, we
implement Open-Pub based on Ethereum 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.
