Fusion of blockchain and IoT in scientific publishing: Taxonomy, tools, and future directions.

Scientific publishing systems (SPS) provides platforms to authors, reviewers, and editors to express research for the betterment of the community. Traditionally, the research databases are assigned electronic identifiers, and manuscripts are preserved in electronic form. Owing to the large scale of submissions in the databases, it becomes difficult for the repositories to manage their electronic volumes. The search queries and retrievals are complex, and the publishing process takes a lot of time, which defeats the purpose of the contribution in many cases by the author. Moreover, the process is non-transparent, and is limited due to ineffective article tracking policies. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the libraries have transitioned towards smart objects that process academic repositories with low-powered computations. In the same way, meta-information passes through lightweight IoT protocols to distributed servers. Coupled with blockchain (BC), a secured and trusted publishing platform is assured in SPS, with transparency among all academic stakeholders. Traditional SPS platforms do not provide any rewarding method for peer review and do not support and store unsuccessful articles. Besides, published works are not verified thoroughly, and this can lead to misconduct in scientific publishing. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a survey on the fusion of BC and IoT for SPS, which serves the dual purpose of low-powered computational tagging of manuscripts as smart objects, and that also supports rewarding and completing the verification of transactions by peers without involving a third party. A case study of a hyperledger driven IoT-enabled scientific publishing system (SPS) is proposed to address the limitations of the traditional SPS. Lastly, we present open issues and challenges concerning the current SPSs and the proposed BC-driven SPS. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.