ScholarCoin
ScholarCoin
By Scholars, For Scholars
A self-regulating, decentralized incentive model proposed to balance scientific contributions and peer review service, constructing a healthier economy for global research.
Explore the ProposalAddressing the imbalances of the contemporary academic publishing model.
Scientific paper output is growing exponentially, while peer reviewing remains uncompensated, under-recognized, and resource-strained. ScholarCoin balances paper production and reviewing service.
Treats academic submissions as transactions and completed peer reviews as verification work. If you consume resources (submitting papers), you must verify transactions (reviewing papers) to earn coins.
Coins earned from peer review verification can be traded for other vital academic services, such as manuscript submissions, conference chairing, or committee positions.
Rigorous mathematical modeling for a balanced, non-inflationary academic economy.
Let $s$ be a paper submission to a scientific venue, and let $r$ represent a completed verification task (peer review). A submission requires the expenditure of $C(s)$ ScholarCoins, while a review yields a payout $P(r)$:
To prevent authors from spamming venues with low-quality resubmissions, we define a submission cost function that increases monotonically with the resubmission count $k \ge 0$:
where $\alpha > 0$ represents the resubmission friction coefficient. As $k$ increases, authors are incentivized to thoroughly revise their work to avoid exhausting their ScholarCoin reserves.
To prevent inflation, the system enforces a strict zero-inflation cap. The total coin supply minted per submission is bounded. Let $M$ be the number of reviews submitted within the first $N$ hours. The payout $P(r_i)$ for review $r_i$ is proportional to its length and quality metrics $f(\text{len}(r_i))$:
This guarantees that the total payout minted for reviewing a paper matches the basic submission cost sink (exactly 1 coin), ensuring token supply equilibrium.
To prevent commercialization of peer reviews and maintain academic integrity, ScholarCoins are forbidden from being converted to fiat currencies or used for regular salaries:
This preserves ScholarCoin purely as a medium of academic coordination and service balancing.
How the idea developed in February 2018 during discussions on Twitter/X.
I'm curious: what day of the week do people prefer for conference deadlines?
“Thursday anywhere on earth”
Friday 5pm according to the author's location. if multiple authors, the earliest time is used. we enforce it by using gps and blockchain which records the time of submission.
I prefer the "Thursday anywhere" standard because it's friendly to night people :)
you can always submit it in the night on Thursday regardless of the deadline ;)
Yes!!! I remember one EMNLP deadline turned out to be 5pm on a Friday in Seattle, where I was and that was the best deadline. Sane finish to the paper.
people seem to like this idea. to make it more solid: each transaction (submission) is verified by review. each review receives a coin which is then used for submission.
we control the amount of "academic coin" by enforcing one coin a submission (payout is divided by the number of reviews in the first N hours)
you can trade these academic coins for other academic services (chairing a conference, being on a committee and so on)
new academic economy thus begins..
in order to maintain healthy relationship between the academic coin and existing currency, we forbid the academic coin to be used for regular salary.
I need to do ICO. I heard no one uses raw HTML anymore. what do I need to make a fancy one-page homepage with scroll-based navigation and without any actual content?
addendum: the cost of submission grows if it's resubmission. another: the payout will be proportional to the length of a review.
ICO could be open only to the existing conferences and scholarly societies to bootstrap the entire environment and to encourage their adoption ICO will unfortunately have to be based on US dollars to fund the operation.
I really want to like this idea, but the conceptualisation as it isn right now has some issues but definitely things that can be dealt with!
seems to lead to a bootstrapping problem. do we give out flashloans to new authors? how many coins until they lock themselves out? can they just loan from review-rich people?
Key critiques raised by the academic community and potential resolutions.
A major critique is the barrier for new authors (e.g., first-year PhD students) who have no coins to submit. Proposed resolutions include:
(a) Academic Grants: Scholarly societies or institutions can issue a one-time "startup grant" of 1 ScholarCoin to verified junior researchers.
(b) Co-authorship Pooling: Coin balances are pooled across all co-authors of a submission. Junior authors submit by utilizing coins held by senior co-authors or advisors.
(c) Peer Review Apprenticeship: Junior scholars earn coins by reviewing under the direct mentorship and endorsement of senior co-authors.
Senior researchers who conduct reviews frequently may accumulate substantial ScholarCoin balances without needing to submit matching numbers of papers.
To maintain high currency velocity and prevent hoarding, the system can introduce transaction limits, coin expiration dates (representing the decaying half-life of reviewing relevance), or formal coin lending markets where review-rich scholars lease coins to junior researchers.
If coin payouts are linked simply to reviews, users may submit low-quality or automatic reviews to "farm" coins.
This is regulated by the quality weighting function $f(\text{len}(r))$. Payouts are scaled by the review's character length, structure, and peer evaluation (e.g., authors rating the usefulness of reviews). A review deemed useless or AI-generated by the editorial board receives a payout of $P(r) = 0$.