Self-sovereign identity for verifiable authorship consent and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening in academic publishing: a permissioned blockchain registry approach

Abstract

Introduction:

Academic publishing, a cornerstone of knowledge dissemination and scientific advancement, increasingly faces ethical threats such as unconsented authorship, gift authorship, author ambiguity, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. Although infrastructures such as ORCID support researcher identity disambiguation, they do not adequately enforce explicit authorship consent, verify contributor roles, or enable privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening during peer review.

Methods:

This study proposes a standards-aligned decentralized conceptual framework for ethical authorship validation. The framework integrates Self-Sovereign Identity, Decentralized Identifiers, and Verifiable Credentials to capture explicit co-author consent as verifiable events, embed verified authorship metadata in publications, and support privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest checks through zero-knowledge techniques. A permissioned ledger functions as a trust registry for hashes and status indicators, without storing personally identifiable information on-chain, and supports revocation. To assess the relevance of the proposed design, a stakeholder survey was conducted with researchers, editors, and reviewers.

Results:

The proposed framework addresses key gaps in existing scholarly identity and publishing infrastructures by introducing mechanisms for verifiable authorship consent, contributor-role validation, and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening. Survey findings indicate strong stakeholder support for both consent enforcement and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest checks.

Discussion:

This work contributes a conceptual design for strengthening trust, accountability, and transparency in academic publishing through decentralized identity and verifiable credential technologies. The findings provide formative empirical support for future prototyping and evaluation.

1 Introduction

Academic publishing is a cornerstone of scientific progress, yet its integrity is increasingly strained by unethical authorship practices and opaque review processes. In 2023 alone, more than 10,000 papers were retracted—a historical peak—highlighting systemic weaknesses in how contributions and conflicts are governed (Van Noorden, 2023). Problematic behaviors such as unconsented authorship, exclusion of legitimate contributors, and “gift authorship” undermine credibility (Johann, 2022; Singhal and Kalra, 2021); unresolved conflicts of interest and occasional impersonation in peer review further erode trust (Bell et al., 2024).

Blockchain-based approaches have been explored to increase auditability in scholarly workflows (Stockburger et al., 2021; Belchior et al., 2020). However, most efforts either (i) address identity disambiguation without enforcing explicit co-author consent, or (ii) emphasize transparency while leaving open questions about privacy (e.g., COI checks that unnecessarily reveal affiliations). Widely adopted identity infrastructures like ORCID help disambiguate authors but do not natively verify contributor roles, record consent events, or support privacy-preserving conflict screening during peer review (Butincu and Alexandrescu, 2024; Preukschat and Reed, 2021). These gaps leave room for predatory practices and post hoc disputes (Stockburger et al., 2021).

In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that specifies concrete, interoperable interfaces to (i) capture explicit co-author consent as verifiable events, (ii) embed verified authorship metadata in publications, and (iii) enable privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest (COI) checks. The design leverages Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) with Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to establish cryptographically verifiable identities and contribution records (Bistarelli et al., 2023). A permissioned blockchain serves as a shared registry for hashes and credential status, supporting revocation and audit. For COI, we outline a zero-knowledge (ZK) non-intersection check that allows a reviewer to prove the absence of conflicts without revealing affiliations (Naik and Jenkins, 2020; Samir et al., 2022).

This work is a design contribution with initial empirical grounding. We do not present a full implementation; instead, we specify interoperable interfaces and verification steps that can be instantiated on a permissioned ledger and integrated with existing publishing pipelines. We also discuss deployment constraints (interoperability, scalability, legal compliance) and limitations to inform a subsequent prototype and evaluation.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews related efforts in identity, consent, and blockchain-enabled publishing. Section 3 introduces SSI, blockchain, and cryptographic preliminaries. Section 4 details the architecture, operational workflow, revocation, and the ZK COI check. Section 5 reports the stakeholder survey and how its signals shaped the design. Section 6 discusses limitations and future work.

2 Related work

The rapid evolution of academic publishing has motivated the use of emerging technologies to address ethical, procedural, and systemic challenges (Javaid et al., 2021). In particular, blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) are often cited for their potential to improve transparency, accountability, and efficiency across scholarly workflows. We review work on (i) blockchain in publishing, (ii) authorship validation and identity management, and (iii) peer-review transparency, and then position our contribution with respect to these strands.

2.1 Blockchain applications in academic publishing

Blockchain has been proposed to provide immutable, verifiable records for publication events. Novotny et al. (Novotny et al., 2018) explored Hyperledger Fabric for transparency in research processes (e.g., productivity tracking, reputation, peer review). Tarkhanov et al. (2019) used Ethereum to ensure data immutability for online journals, demonstrating integrity guarantees for published artifacts. Mohan (Mohan, 2019) argued that permissioned blockchains can mitigate misconduct pressures, while Mackey et al. (2019) proposed consortium governance (e.g., decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs) spanning submission, review, and editorial decisions. Tenorio-Fornés et al. (2021) combined blockchain with IPFS and reviewer reputation to support decentralized peer review and open access.

In addition, Beştaş et al. (2023) proposes a blockchain-backed workflow for managing manuscript submission, review, and publication, emphasizing decentralization and tamper-evident tracking of editorial events. Similarly, Skala et al. (2024) outlines a conceptual model for “Digital Academic Publishing” (DAP) on blockchain, focusing on transparent provenance and long-term preservation of scholarly outputs. Both strands strengthen the case for blockchain as an infrastructure for scientific publishing, particularly for auditability and process transparency, but they do not explicitly address per-author consent as a verifiable, manuscript-bound event or privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest screening.

These systems advance auditability and provenance but typically emphasize process transparency rather than privacy by design. As a result, explicit co-author consent enforcement and privacy-preserving conflict-of-interest (COI) checks are either out of scope or only partially addressed. Practical concerns—such as scalable revocation and integration with existing identity infrastructure—are also unevenly covered.

2.2 Authorship validation and identity management

Authorship validation remains a significant concern in scholarly communication. Traditional identity management solutions, exemplified by platforms such as ORCID (Haak et al., 2012), primarily focus on disambiguating author identities through unique identifiers and integrating metadata with systems like CrossRef. However, they do not natively (i) enforce explicit, per-author consent tied to a manuscript, (ii) attest contributor roles as verifiable credentials, or (iii) support private COI screening during review. Prior blockchain-based proposals note the value of decentralized identifiers and attestations Tenorio-Fornés et al. (2021), yet often prioritize public transparency over selective disclosure and privacy. Our work leverages SSI principles with Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) (Preukschat and Reed, 2021; Bistarelli et al., 2023) to bind consent events and roles to cryptographically verifiable artifacts, while keeping personal data off-chain.

2.3 Peer Review transparency and associated challenges

Peer review is a cornerstone of academic publishing but is frequently criticized for lacking transparency, being vulnerable to biases, and suffering inefficiencies. Tennant et al. (Tennant, 2018) identified critical challenges including editorial responsibility, reviewer subjectivity, and inconsistency in review standards, calling for standardized procedures and shared data infrastructures. Similarly, Tennant and Ross-Hellauer (Tennant and Ross-Hellauer, 2020) advocated enhanced transparency and accountability to bolster peer review legitimacy.

Blockchain-enabled approaches offer promising remedies to these issues. Mackey et al. (2019) proposed leveraging DAOs to manage peer-review activities, generating immutable records of reviewer interactions. Additionally, Tenorio-Fornés et al. (2021) introduced reputation mechanisms combined with privacy-preserving techniques to incentivize transparent, high-quality peer reviews. Nevertheless, widespread adoption of blockchain-based peer-review systems remains hindered by technical complexity and resistance from stakeholders accustomed to traditional workflows (Yli-Huumo et al., 2016).

2.4 Broader blockchain applications and lessons learned

Experiences from adjacent domains (e.g., governance and healthcare) underscore recurring design tensions: transparency vs. privacy, interoperability vs. autonomy, and auditability vs. data minimization (Yin, 2023; Dagher et al., 2018). Yin (2023) discussed blockchain applications in corporate governance, emphasizing benefits like transparency, real-time accessibility, and cost-effective record management. In healthcare, blockchain frameworks such as those proposed by Dagher et al. (Dagher et al., 2018) aim to balance data privacy and accessibility in electronic health records management. Despite demonstrating promising capabilities, blockchain applications in these sectors also highlight consistent challenges related to scalability, interoperability, and user adoption—challenges equally pertinent to academic publishing workflows. Successful deployments typically minimize on-chain personal data, rely on off-chain storage for sensitive records, and provide revocation/status mechanisms, lessons directly applicable to scholarly publishing.

2.5 Gaps and research opportunities

Across the above strands, we identify four persistent gaps: (G1) lack of verifiable, per-author consent tied to a specific manuscript (Haak et al., 2012); (G2) absence of privacy-preserving COI checks that avoid disclosure of affiliations; (G3) limited attention to revocation and status for credentials/consent; and (G4) incomplete guidance for metadata embedding that survives post-publication. Table 1 summarizes how our design targets these gaps relative to ORCID and representative blockchain-based proposals.

In contrast to prior work that largely treats identity as disambiguation, our contribution focuses on consent as a verifiable event, COI screening with privacy, and standards-aligned revocation and embedding. These choices directly inform the framework in Section 4, where we specify a minimal set of interfaces (ConsentToken VC, status checks, and an on-chain receipt model) that can be integrated with existing publishing pipelines while keeping personal data off-chain.

3 Preliminaries

This section summarizes the core building blocks used in our design: Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a permissioned blockchain as a trust registry, and privacy-preserving cryptography. We also state the standards and notation we rely on and outline a concise threat model and security goals. These elements collectively support authorship validation, consent enforcement, and privacy-preserving conflict screening.

3.1 Self-sovereign identity (SSI)

Digital identity broadly encompasses attributes and identifiers associated with an individual or entity within a specific digital context, facilitating authentication and authorization processes online (Lux et al., 2020). In contrast to conventional identity management systems, which typically rely on centralized service providers, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) enables individuals to maintain control and ownership over their digital identities (Pava Diaz et al., 2023). SSI empowers users with sovereign, persistent, and portable identities, providing secure access to digital services without reliance on intermediaries and enhancing user privacy and security (Preukschat and Reed, 2021; Schardong and Custódio, 2022).

Central to the SSI architecture are Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), cryptographically secure, globally unique identifiers that enable autonomous identity management independent of centralized authorities (Bistarelli et al., 2023). Figure 1 illustrates a representative DID structure: the public key associated with the DID is stored in a decentralized registry (e.g., a blockchain), while the corresponding private key remains securely held by the user within a digital wallet, facilitating cryptographic verification during interactions.

FIGURE 1

Complementing DIDs are Verifiable Credentials (VCs), digitally signed attestations issued by trusted entities to validate specific user attributes such as institutional affiliation, credentials, and qualifications (Lux et al., 2020). VCs support selective disclosure of attributes, enabling users to provide only the minimal information required for verification and thereby preserving data privacy.

The core interactions within the SSI framework are depicted in Figure 2. The primary stakeholders are: (i) the Issuer, who generates and cryptographically signs credentials; (ii) the Holder, who stores credentials securely in a digital wallet; and (iii) the Verifier, who requests and validates credentials presented by the holder. The blockchain acts as a decentralized, tamper-proof trust registry, facilitating secure verification of DIDs and credential hashes.

FIGURE 2

In the context of academic publishing, SSI supports secure, verifiable author identities and affiliations, addresses ambiguity and consent challenges, and safeguards sensitive personal information during authorship and peer-review processes (Stockburger et al., 2021; Belchior et al., 2020).

3.2 Blockchain technology

Blockchain technology serves as a foundational infrastructure for SSI by providing a decentralized, transparent, and immutable ledger for securely recording cryptographic commitments such as hashes or pointers to identity-related information (Soltani et al., 2021). By anchoring cryptographic hashes rather than full records, blockchains can help protect privacy while still enabling robust, independently verifiable audit trails.

In our framework, we instantiate these properties using a consortium-operated permissioned ledger that acts as a trust registry; Section 4 details this instantiation and its role in the overall architecture.

3.3 Cryptographic techniques

3.4 Standards and notation

3.5 Persistent authorship challenges in academic publishing

As outlined in Section 1, we focus on four recurring failure modes in current scholarly workflows: unconsented authorship, gift/ghost authorship, conflicts of interest in peer review, and weak auditability of consent. Existing infrastructures (e.g., ORCID) excel at identity disambiguation but do not natively enforce per-author consent, provide private COI screening, or maintain immutable, manuscript-bound consent records (Bai et al., 2022; Samir et al., 2022). These shortcomings motivate the threat model and security goals formalized in Section 3.6.

3.6 Threat model and security goals

Building on the challenges summarized above, we model adversaries and channels as follows.

Adversaries. (A1) Malicious submitter adds non-consenting co-authors; (A2) reviewer with undisclosed COI seeks assignment; (A3) curious verifier attempts to learn hidden affiliations; (A4) external observer attempts cross-manuscript linkage; (A5) compromised issuer revokes or forges credentials.

Channels. DIDComm over TLS between wallets and journals; permissioned ledger for anchoring hashes and status bits; issuer status endpoints for revocation.

Goals. (G1) Explicit consent: each co-author issues a signed, manuscript-bound ConsentToken VC. (G2) Auditability: a hash of each verified ConsentToken (and COI proof receipt) is anchored on-chain. (G3) Private COI: reviewers prove non-intersection with author affiliations without revealing either side. (G4) Revocation: issuers and journals can invalidate VCs and consents via status lists. (G5) Data minimization: only hashes and status bits on-chain; VCs and PII off-chain. (G6) Interoperability: artifacts adhere to DID/VC and status-list conventions.

These preliminaries motivate the concrete architecture and workflow specified in Section 4, where we detail consent messaging, status checks, the non-intersection ZK proof, and metadata embedding.

3.7 Metadata leakage and linkability

In all cases, we deliberately minimize on-chain linkage by (i) keeping registry entries to fixed-size cryptographic commitments and status words, (ii) avoiding on-chain DIDs, affiliations, or ORCID-like identifiers, and (iii) using salted aliases for manuscripts.

4 Proposed framework

This section presents a secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving framework for authorship validation in academic publishing. Building upon Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), blockchain, and cryptographic primitives such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), the framework aims to strengthen ethical compliance while preserving data privacy. We elaborate on the system’s architecture, technical components, credential lifecycle, and conflict-of-interest verification mechanisms.

4.1 Actors, roles, and trust boundary

We consider five operational actors and one shared registry. Each actor controls its own keys and wallets; all personal data and full Verifiable Credentials (VCs) remain off-chain. The permissioned ledger functions only as a shared audit registry that anchors hashes and status bits (revocation) for auditability. Threats and goals are as stated in Section 3.6.

4.1.1 Actors

4.1.2 Who sees what (privacy boundary)

4.1.3 Trust boundary and assumptions

4.1.4 Link to threats and goals (section 3.6)

4.1.5 Out of scope

Endpoint security of user devices and human-process disputes (e.g., contribution negotiation) are not solved cryptographically; our scope is to record explicit consent and enforce privacy-preserving COI checks with auditable receipts that support subsequent adjudication.

4.1.6 Issuer trust, KYC/AML, and governance

Affiliation VCs introduce an explicit trust assumption: if issuers are not credible, then conflict-of-interest screening and authorship validation lose reliability. We therefore make issuer onboarding and governance explicit rather than implicit.

4.1.6.1 Issuer types

Each issuer is represented by a DID (e.g., did:web:university-domain or an equivalent method; see §3.4) and signs credentials under its own keys.

4.1.6.2 Onboarding and verification

The consortium’s governing body or a designated committee verifies each issuer’s credentials and compliance with these requirements during the onboarding process. The resulting list of trusted issuer DIDs is published as part of the consortium configuration and referenced in verification policies for journals and auditor backends.

4.1.6.3 Handling bad or compromised issuers

These mechanisms do not eliminate the need for institutional governance, but they make issuer assumptions explicit and auditable, rather than relying on opaque, ad hoc verification of affiliations. In this sense, AffiliationVCs are no more “centralized” than current affiliation letters or HR attestations, but they are better structured for automated and privacy-preserving verification.

4.1.7 Institution normalization and COI correctness

The correctness of the non-intersection COI proof in §4.6 depends critically on how affiliations are normalized before hashing. If two records that refer to the same institution are normalized differently (e.g., “Univ. of X” vs. “University of X″ vs. an internal acronym), the system may treat them as distinct and fail to detect a genuine conflict.

Even with such measures, residual risks remain. Inconsistent normalization can lead to false negatives (missed conflicts), whereas overly aggressive normalization could, in principle, merge distinct entities and yield false positives. In our deployment plan (§4.10), we therefore treat normalization quality as a first-class concern: pilot evaluations should track how often manual overrides are required, and governance documents should specify how the consortium curates and updates its institutional registry. The ZK construction itself remains agnostic to the particular identifier scheme, provided that a deterministic is applied consistently on both author and reviewer sides before hashing.

4.2 System architecture

FIGURE 3

4.3 Why a permissioned ledger instead of a local audit log?

One concern is whether a permissioned blockchain is necessary, or whether simpler tamper-evident mechanisms such as append-only logs or transparency logs would suffice. In a purely local setting—for example, a single journal maintaining its own records—an append-only Merkle log or key-transparency-style log would indeed be adequate to detect ex post modification of consent or COI records.

At the same time, we deliberately restrict the ledger to the minimal registry role described in Section 4: only fixed-size hashes and status bits are recorded on-chain, while DIDs, Verifiable Credentials, and any personal data remain off-chain under the control of holders, issuers, and journals. For single-journal pilots, the same protocol can be instantiated using a local transparency log, and the ledger can be introduced incrementally when multi-party interoperability or shared auditability is required.

Read access in the baseline deployment is restricted to consortium participants; external verifiers (e.g., readers checking an article) interact with the system via journal- or publisher-operated APIs that query the registry on their behalf. This indirection reduces the exposure of raw ledger metadata to the general public and allows journals to enforce access controls and rate-limiting in line with their data protection policies.

4.4 Credential lifecycle workflow

4.5 Credential revocation and auditability

Revocation follows a StatusList-style mechanism. Each VC carries a credentialStatus pointer and index. Institutions control AffiliationVC status; journals control ConsentToken status (e.g., withdrawal or dispute). Verifiers must check status at verification time.

The registry’s append-only receipts provide an immutable audit of (i) verified consent events and (ii) verified COI proofs, without exposing PII or VC payloads. If consent is later withdrawn, the status bit is flipped; future verifications fail while the historic receipt remains available for audit and dispute resolution.

4.6 Zero-knowledge non-intersection construction and security

We now make the zero-knowledge (ZK) conflict-of-interest check from §4.1 concrete. Intuitively, a reviewer proves that none of their institutional affiliations intersect the set of author affiliations for a given manuscript, without revealing either side in the clear. We formalize the statement, describe a baseline circuit, and briefly discuss the choice of proof system and its security properties.

4.6.1 Statement and relation

For a manuscript, the journal computes a session-specific salt and a set of author commitmentswhere is a SNARK-friendly hash (e.g., Poseidon) and maps free-text affiliations to canonical identifiers (see §4.1.7).

A reviewer holds affiliations as part of one or more AffiliationVCs. The non-intersection statement we wish to prove is:

We define the NP relation over public input and witness as:

The ZK proof convinces the verifier that without revealing the values.

4.6.2 Circuit sketch

A simple inequality constraint can be expressed using the standard “inverse trick”: for each pair the circuit introduces a witness variable and enforcesIf , then Equation 1 would require , which is unsatisfiable. Conversely, whenever the prover can set in the field, making the constraint hold. Thus, the circuit enforces for all , and hence non-intersection.¹

The resulting constraint system is in the baseline construction, where is the number of (distinct) author affiliations and is the number of reviewer affiliations. In typical editorial settings is small (often ) and is bounded by the number of authors and their institutions. For larger , Merkle-tree or accumulator-based variants can reduce complexity to ; we leave their implementation to future work and focus on the simpler, more transparent baseline.

4.6.3 Instantiation choice

The main trade-off is the need for a trusted setup per circuit. In our use case, the COI-check circuit is fixed and can be generated once under consortium governance; the structured reference string can then be reused by all participating journals and reviewers. Alternative proof systems (PLONK, Halo2, zk-STARKs) with universal or transparent setups are discussed in §4.7.

4.6.4 Security discussion

This construction directly addresses adversary (A2) in §3.6: a reviewer with an undisclosed conflict cannot produce a valid proof without breaking SNARK soundness, while adversaries (A3) and (A4) are mitigated by the use of salted commitments and zero-knowledge, aligned with goals (G3) and (G5).

4.7 Comparison of candidate ZK proof systems

The non-intersection circuit in §4.6 can be instantiated with several modern zero-knowledge proof systems. Table 2 summarizes four widely used families along qualitative dimensions relevant to our setting: trusted setup requirements, proof size, verifier cost, prover cost, hardware expectations, and ecosystem maturity.

For the initial prototype we favour a Groth16-style zk-SNARK due to its extremely small proofs, low verification cost in editorial backends, and availability of mature tooling and audited implementations. The primary drawback—a circuit-specific trusted setup—is mitigated by the fact that the conflict-of-interest circuit is fixed and can be generated once under consortium governance.

At the same time, the framework is deliberately proof-system-agnostic. In deployments where avoiding a trusted setup is paramount, a zk-STARK instantiation could be preferable, at the cost of larger proofs and higher verifier overhead. Universal-setup systems such as PLONK or Halo2 provide a middle ground, allowing multiple circuits (e.g., different COI policies) to share a single structured reference string, and enabling recursive aggregation of proofs if needed for batched verification across many manuscripts. We therefore treat Groth16 as a pragmatic baseline rather than a hard requirement.

4.8 Complexity and indicative performance

The non-intersection circuit described in §4.6 has baseline complexity constraints, where is the number of distinct author affiliations for a manuscript and is the number of affiliations held by the reviewer. In typical editorial settings we expect to be small (often ) and to be bounded by the number of authors and their institutions, yielding circuits in the low tens of thousands of constraints for the baseline construction. Merkle-tree or accumulator variants can reduce the complexity to at the cost of slightly more complex circuits; we leave their implementation to future work and focus here on the transparent baseline.

To address concerns about processing requirements in multi-author, multi-reviewer scenarios, Table 3 provides an indicative mapping from problem size to circuit size and expected prover and verifier effort under a Groth16-style zk-SNARK, as selected in Section 4.7. The values are extrapolated from published Groth16 benchmarks, where circuits with roughly constraints exhibit proving times on the order of 3 seconds and verification times in the low millisecond range on commodity hardware (Vinaik, 2025).²

These magnitudes are compatible with editorial workflows in which proof generation runs on a journal or publisher backend rather than on end-user devices. For more demanding settings (e.g., very large author lists or resource-constrained devices), several optimizations are available: (i) replacing the inequality checks with Merkle or accumulator membership gadgets; (ii) batching multiple COI proofs and aggregating them using recursive proof systems such as Halo2 or PLONK-style schemes (§4.7); or (iii) offloading heavy proving to specialized prover services or accelerators (Garg et al., 2023; Vinaik, 2025). A full empirical evaluation across different proof systems and circuit variants is outside the scope of this design-oriented contribution and is left as future work.

4.9 Registry/chaincode interface (permissioned ledger)

Write access is restricted to consortium members in specific roles (e.g., journals for receipt anchoring, issuers and journals for status updates); read access is consortium-public, with external verifiers typically interacting via journal- or publisher-operated APIs rather than directly with the ledger.

A concrete chaincode sketch with example function signatures is provided in Supplementary Appendix 3; the framework itself is agnostic to the specific smart contract platform as long as it provides an append-only log of receipt hashes and status artifacts under consortium governance.

4.10 Deployment and pilot plan

A pragmatic pilot will (1) enforce per-author ConsentToken collection with a hasAllConsents gate prior to review, (2) introduce ZK COI proofs for a subset of reviewer assignments, and (3) embed consent/COI receipt TXIDs in JATS/PDF and Crossref deposits. It will track: fraction of manuscripts with complete consent before review, consent turnaround time, COI proof verification rate, ZK prover time versus author-set size, and confirmation that registry contents remain limited to cryptographic receipts and status artifacts.

5 Discussion and evaluation

We assess the feasibility and perceived value of the proposed SSI-based framework using a formative stakeholder survey and discuss implications, limitations, and next steps. Our aim is to provide design guidance rather than summative effectiveness claims.

5.1 Survey design and measurement

We conducted a small formative survey to elicit experiences and design preferences from stakeholders involved in scholarly publishing. The target population comprised individuals with current or recent roles as authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, or research administrators. Recruitment followed a snowball (referral) strategy: initial invitations were sent via professional mailing lists and institutional contacts, and recipients were encouraged to forward the survey to colleagues. Participation was voluntary and uncompensated. The survey remained open for approximately 4 weeks in 2024.

The final sample comprised respondents: 80 researchers/authors (50%), 38 reviewers (24%), 21 editors (13%), 10 publishers (6%), and 10 research administrators (6%). Item-level denominators vary () because some questions were optional or role-specific; for each quantitative item we therefore report the number of valid responses alongside proportions.

For descriptive results we report response counts and proportions. Given the non-probability sampling and uneven item-level , inferential statistics are not appropriate; instead, for key proportions we compute Wilson 95% confidence intervals to convey uncertainty (see Supplementary Appendix 1). We therefore treat the findings as design signals for feature prioritization rather than population estimates of prevalence or support.

5.2 Key findings

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Beyond the items summarized above, several additional results further contextualize the problem and perceived value of a consent-based system. First, respondents viewed unethical authorship as substantively harmful: across three practices, roughly half to two-thirds rated the impact as “very serious” or “extremely serious”—including (53%) for inclusion of authors for reasons unrelated to contribution, (53%) for addition of senior researchers without explicit consent, and (68%) for exclusion of contributors who deserve authorship. Personal exposure was also common: just over half of respondents (53%) reported pressure to add someone as an author despite minimal contribution, (32%) reported being added as an author without their knowledge, and only (26%) selected “none of the above.”

Second, support extended beyond a single adoption item to specific features and expected benefits. For example, respondents (78%) agreed or strongly agreed that real-time notifications about authorship status would be useful. When asked about potential benefits of such a system, the most frequently selected options were “improved integrity of research” (78%), “reduction in unethical practices” (61%), and “increased trust in authorship claims” (56%), with about half (50%) also anticipating better management of citation metrics. Likewise, Likert items about transparency, reduced unethical practices, enhanced trust, and addressing a significant need yielded weighted averages between 3.5 and 4.0 on a 5-point scale (where 3 = “neither agree nor disagree” and 4 = “agree”), indicating that median responses lay between “agree” and “strongly agree” rather than being neutral.

5.3 Implications

Taken together, the findings suggest that stakeholders perceive unethical authorship practices, such as unconsented and ghost authorship, as a meaningful problem and view existing mechanisms as insufficiently robust. The proposed SSI- and blockchain-based framework addresses these concerns by establishing tamper-evident records of authorship consent and verifiable contribution metadata, and by supporting COI screening without exposing affiliations.

The reported support for integration and automation indicates that adoption will depend heavily on how seamlessly the framework fits into existing publishing workflows. At the same time, concerns about privacy, technical complexity, and platform integration highlight critical areas for careful attention in deployment. Effective implementation will require targeted educational efforts, pilot deployments with clear KPIs, and incremental integration with current systems. If these challenges are addressed, the framework has the potential to improve accountability and trust in authorship and peer review processes.

5.4 Limitations

Our contribution is primarily design-oriented, and several limitations follow from this positioning. As discussed in §5.1 and Supplementary Appendix 1, the stakeholder survey is explicitly treated as formative rather than representative: it relies on snowball sampling, small and uneven item-level denominators, and self-report Likert-type items. We therefore use the survey only to obtain design signals and feature priorities, not to estimate population-level prevalence or support. Future work should combine such perceptions with behavioural data from live deployments (e.g., observed consent completion rates and COI check usage).

Second, the technical architecture has not yet been evaluated through a full implementation. We specify a concrete non-intersection circuit, discuss candidate proof systems, and provide order-of-magnitude complexity estimates based on existing Groth16 benchmarks (§4.6, §4.8), but we do not report end-to-end latency, prover performance across real manuscripts, or registry throughput under load. The deployment plan in §4.10 is intended to address this by instrumenting a pilot with explicit KPIs (consent turnaround time, COI proof verification rate, prover time as a function of and , zero on-chain PII).

Third, several critical aspects of trust and data quality are handled by governance rather than cryptography. AffiliationVCs depend on credible issuers and robust onboarding (domain verification, legal agreements, KYC/AML for private entities) as outlined in §4.1.6; if issuers behave maliciously or negligently, the system can revoke and de-trust them, but it cannot prevent all bad issuance a priori. Likewise, correct conflict-of-interest detection hinges on consistent institutional normalization (§4.1.7): residual false negatives remain possible if affiliations cannot be mapped cleanly to canonical identifiers (e.g., ROR–Research Organization Registry–IDs or the older GRID IDs), and pilot evaluations should explicitly monitor and mitigate such cases.

Fourth, although the registry stores only fixed-size hashes and status bits, side channels and linkage risks remain. An adversary with access to both the ledger and editorial systems could, in principle, exploit timing correlations, transaction patterns, or metadata in JATS/PDF files (e.g., embedded transaction identifiers) to infer relationships across manuscripts. We partially mitigate this by using salted manuscript aliases, avoiding on-chain DIDs or affiliations, and supporting batching or delayed anchoring (§4.3), but a formal analysis of linkability and traffic-analysis-style attacks is left to future work.

Finally, introducing a consortium registry and SSI-based workflows imposes non-trivial organizational overhead. Participating journals, publishers, and institutions must agree on governance (trust framework, issuer onboarding and removal, dispute resolution, retention policies, cross-border hosting), and stakeholders require training and appropriate wallet UX (key management, recovery, multi-device use). While these challenges are comparable to those faced by other shared infrastructures (e.g., ORCID, Crossref), our design does not resolve them; instead, it aims to make assumptions explicit and to provide technical hooks (status lists, receipt anchoring, DID-based policies) that such governance frameworks can build upon.

6 Conclusion

We presented a standards-aligned framework that treats authorship consent as a verifiable event and conflict-of-interest (COI) screening as a privacy-preserving proof. The design comprises four concrete primitives: (i) a manuscript-bound ConsentToken VC issued by each co-author; (ii) a ZK non-intersection proof over salted commitments for COI; (iii) StatusList-style revocation for both affiliation and consent; and (iv) an append-only receipt registry that anchors only fixed-size hashes and status artifacts. Personal data and full VC payloads remain off-chain. The permissioned registry (Raft-ordered) provides predictable latency, auditability, and consortium governance without gas costs, while alignment with W3C DID/VC, DIDComm, and StatusList enables incremental integration with ORCID, Crossref, and ROR/GRID (cf.Section 4.1; Section 4.10).

Our formative survey (snowball sample) signaled strong support for explicit, manuscript-bound consent and private COI checks, and highlighted concerns—privacy, technical complexity, and integration—that directly shaped our choices: off-chain PII with hash/status-only anchoring, interoperable VC/DID schemas, and lightweight JATS/PDF metadata embedding with opaque receipt references (Section 5). Together, these elements provide a deployable path that improves transparency and accountability without disrupting existing publishing infrastructure.

As immediate next steps, we will run a limited pilot and evaluate consent completion, turnaround, COI proof verification, prover time, and confirmation of zero on-chain PII, as detailed in Section 4.10.

Future work. Implement and benchmark the registry/wallet flows; compare COI circuits (baseline equality vs. accumulator/Merkle variants); run usability studies for consent/withdrawal and reviewer proofs; formalize linkability/privacy bounds under salted aliases; and publish governance templates (trust framework, issuer onboarding, status-list operations). Extending attestations beyond authors (e.g., data curators, software contributors) is a natural next step toward richer, verifiable contribution records.

Overall, the proposed primitives and deployment plan offer a concrete, interoperable route to strengthen ethical authorship validation, while preserving privacy and compatibility with existing scholarly ecosystems.

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