Standing on the shoulders...

To the best of our knowledge, for the first time the idea of using tokens to facilitate Academic publishing was proposed by Melanie Swan in her book "Blockchain: blueprint for a new economy" (p. 63 - 64). That is what she wrote: " ... the token system of the publishing microeconomy to reward contributors, reviewers, editors, commentators, forum participants, advisors, staff, consultants, and indirect service providers involved in scientific publishing." Needless to say that not only blockchain-based tokens or coins can be used for rewards. Another option would be based on DAG (directed acylic graph), that is used by Nano, Stellar and Ripple, among other. Alternatively, rewards can be generated in a closed database-like system but the latter option would make it problematic for the receiving contributors to convert to standard money.

Later, these ideas were developed by Michael Spearpoint who suggested that the referees could be rewarded with tokens based on their public peer-review records kept and validated by Publons system. He also suggested, for the first time (again to the best of my knowledge), that the author would earn tokens/coins for citations. He then added that it would be possible to pay coins only in the case when the citing author decides that the original publication is sound and is of sufficient merit. That is, in my understanding, to eliminate the rewards to the papers that are, for example, disputed or considered scientifically or methodologically unsound.

Dr Spearpoint also suggested that tokens can be used for purchasing Journal subscriptions and that the distribution of tokens would be performed based on ORCID-number registration as a proof of belonging to Academia and to retrieve the list of authors publications. However, it is not straightforward to retrieve citations directly from ORCID website. At Scivi we suggest to use ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID or even ResearcherGate and Google Scholar profiles even though the latter two ofter provide an overestimation of citations. We also encourage referees to submit their reviewer profiles registered at Publons for rewards in Scivi token.

Michael Spearpoint also suggested that this blockchain- or coin-based system can be used to rate individual researchers and Institutions as an alternative to pure citation-based metrics (journal impact factors, h-index, total number of citations) as the proposed system would include the contribution to the field by reviewers. Because of this potential implementation of the system, he is sceptical about a possible conversion to standard money on cryptocurrency exchanges as the rating system could be compromised. However, it is possible to trace the origin of tokens and in the ones that were purchased at exchanges would not be considered in this rating system.