Application of public blockchain to control the immutability of data in online scientific periodicals
| Date | 18 November 2019 |
| Pages | 829-844 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-12-2018-0186 |
| Published date | 18 November 2019 |
| Author | Ivan Tarkhanov,Denis Fomin-Nilov,Michael Fomin |
Application of public blockchain
to control the immutability of data
in online scientific periodicals
Ivan Tarkhanov
State Academic University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russian Federation and
Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control”of Russian Academy
of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation, and
Denis Fomin-Nilov and Michael Fomin
State Academic University for the Humanities,
Moscow, Russian Federation
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of content immutability and integrity of
online scientific periodicals on the sites of small publishers that can be violated not only by the external hack
of the publisher’s site but also by publisher’s and author’s misconduct or by submitting different versions of a
periodical to different sites.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors defined a list of r equirements that verify online sci entific
publications immutab ility and integrity. T hen, the authors analyz ed existing projects and recently
emerged information o n security technologi es and identified challe nges met during the deve lopment
and testing. The use of the public blockchain network Ethereum as a secure storage location for data
was explained.
Findings –The authors develope d the method of checking onl ine scientific periodicals for immutabil ity
and presented ecosyst em architecture to control immutabilit y and integrity of data. On the example of the
online periodical “Istoriya”, it was demonst rated how the immutability of online scient ific publication has
been verified with the use o f the public blockchain ove r a six-month period. Firs t, operating results
were evaluated; challe nges hampering the imple mentation of the suggest ed ecosystem on Ethereum
now were identified; and potential advantage s of the suggested approach as compared to sim ilar projects
were discovered.
Research limitations/implications –The considered prototy pe is not a ready-to-use sy stem, but in
future providing higher transparency and the development of general distributed ecosystem
small publishers will ha ve new opportunities fo r development given that the issues of scalabilit y,
reliability and operating speed on a public blockchain will be addressed. Introduction of the described
ecosystem may even provoke some changes on such conservative market as that of publishing of
academic papers.
Originality/value –This research is one of the first attempts to expand digital object identifier technology
with the use of additional verifications based on the data storage and search in the public blockchain. The
suggested idea is the example of “blockchainified science”that was brought to implementation in a real online
journal. This method has some advantages compared to Crossmark service.
Keywords Ethereum, Blockchainified science, Crossmark, Immutability, Public blockchain,
Scientific periodicals
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In the era of information technologies rapid development, the internet has become the most
powerful tool for the dissemination of academic periodicals. Sites of journals, publishers or
specialized publishing platforms provide many options for readers for searching, reading
and citation of online academic periodicals. However, there is one problem that was unheard
in the era of traditional printed publications –that is the immutability of the content
published on the internet (Evans, 2008). Extensive usage of dynamic changes features in
web content led to the situation when online scientific periodicals have become less trusted
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 37 No. 4, 2019
pp. 829-844
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-12-2018-0186
Received 12 July 2018
Revised 22 July 2018
3 December 2018
24 February 2019
27 March 2019
Accepted 1 April 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
829
Application
of public
blockchain
from an end-user’s perspective. The following risks are identified for online academic
periodicals as well as for any other content published on the internet (Stein, 1998):
•spoofing of journal’s site URL or an article for further phishing or distortion of
information;
•injections of a malicious code aiming at unauthorized data modification or affecting
site operations; and
•DOS attacks or attacks of the buffer overflow type aiming at the disruption of the
web server in order to attempt to control it.
According to Hackmageddon Master Table (2017), there were 25 known cases of attacks to
university sites, to the sites of scientific organizations and other publishers of academic and
scientific periodicals in 2017.
It should be noted that unauthorized spoofing threat can be initiated not only by external
intruders but also by journals’publishers themselves pursuing higher scientometric
indicators (Efimova and Kitcherova, 2012), which is one of the challenges faced by the
modern academic and scientific periodicals (Horner and Minifie, 2011).
Another recently emerged important characteristic specific to the dissemination of
scientific periodicals is related to the “black open access”phenomena (Björk, 2017). The
author themselves publish their content in different repositories even before the official
publication in a certain journal. As a result, several versions of a manuscript are published
and indexed on different sites with no guarantee that the published text is a finished
research by the author.
These issues undermine trust in the official sites of journals and publishers. The world
leaders in academic publishing such as Elsevier, Tomson Reuters and Springer value their
reputation and have enough resources to secure the safety of their sites. As a rule, they
use services like Crossmark to check a publication for immutability and history of
changes, but “trust”to such verification is based on the trust in the vendor service
(Crossmark, 2018).
There are some well-known projects (Rosenthal et al., 2015; Surety, 2018) that address the
issues of integrity, immutability and provenance of the academic papers published online
with the use of decentralized systems that proved its efficiency for the major international
publishers and universities. Access to such a system requires substantial IT resources from
a publisher; besides, they do not focus on the verification of immutability in real time
(Rosenthal et al., 2015; Surety, 2018).
The purpose of this research is to check whether it is possible to create an open
ecosystem for small publishers of academic periodicals with a limited budget using emerged
information technologies. In the frame of the study we developed a prototype of the system
for ensuring immutability and integrity of scientific publications disseminated on the
internet taking into consideration online periodicals specifics, where public blockchain is
used as a trusted “third”party.
Hereinafter we will use the terms “immutability”and “integrity.”In programming, immutable
object (unchangeable object) is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created (in case
of an online periodical, after the publication), while data integrity is the maintenance of, and the
assurance of the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life cycle. This research does not
cover online content authenticity that includes not only immutability and integrity guarantees
but also the issues of authorship and provenance of the published data.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, we justify the choice
of technologies and describe the method to control the immutability of data in
online scientific periodicals; in Section 3, we present the implementation of the method
and define problems encountered during that process; Section 4 is devoted to
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