  We design and implement Publication Chain (PubChain), a decentralized
open-access publication platform built on decentralized and distributed
technologies of blockchain and IPFS peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The
existing publication platforms have some severe drawbacks. First, instead of
promoting widespread knowledge sharing, access to publications on the platforms
owned by publishers is often on a fee basis. This drawback of pay wall prevents
researchers from "standing on the shoulders of giants". Moreover, the peer
review process on most all existing publication platforms (including both
open-access and publisher platforms) is prone to be ineffective, since there is
no proper incentive to reviewers for performing high-qualified reviews.
PubChain is an alternative platform to the existing publication venues aiming
to address their drawbacks. No central third-party owns the contents (i.e.,
papers and reviews) of PubChain. Exploiting blockchain technology, we devise an
elaborate incentive scheme on PubChain to incentivize key stakeholders (i.e.,
authors, readers and reviewers) to participate publication activities on
PubChain in a substantive manner by earning credits and rewards through
self-motivated interactions. We have performed simulations to investigate the
robustness of our proposed incentive scheme against fraudulent publications and
reviews. We also have implemented a prototype of PubChain to demonstrate its
key concepts.
