RPchain: A Blockchain-Based Academic Social Networking Service for Credible Reputation Building

The development of the Web 2.0 technology has brought the prosperity of open science which is devoted to making scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. One of the challenges faced by open science is how to build the scholarly reputation of participants credibly and fairly. Existing academic social networking services use peer reviews to address this problem. However, there are still some drawbacks of these services. They are not friendly to the general public and lack effective incentive mechanisms to attract ordinary users. Moreover, these centralized services have the risks that review records might be tampered or lost. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based academic social network service model which has irrevocable peer review records, traceability of reputation building and appropriate incentives for content contribution. In order to achieve these goals, we propose a novel consensus algorithm named proof of reputation (PoRe) which utilizes the reputation of participants for consensus. Finally, we implement a prototype of the model and empirically validate its security and effectiveness.