RE: Cryptographic Peer-reviewing Solutions

Leonard,
All,

Thank you. These topics are interesting to consider in the contexts of PDF, HTML, and EPUB.

Firstly, at an initial glance, in-document solutions might involve sequences of digital signatures from peer-reviewers, sequences which could culminate with digital signatures from journals.

Secondly, we can consider solutions pertaining to collaborative document-authoring software, e.g., Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Thirdly, we can consider decentralized system architectures, e.g., P2P file-sharing solutions, where end-users (in my opinion, non-anonymous end-users) could add digitally-signed, structured (e.g., JSON-, XML-, or RDF-based) annotations and comments to resources, scholarly and scientific articles and related datasets.

Fourthly, we can consider how to relay information about the cryptographic peer-review of digital documents to end-users. As end-users can click upon lock symbols in Web browsers' address bars to obtain more information about secure connections, they could click upon green checkmarks or other symbols to obtain more information about the cryptographic peer-review data pertaining to a digital document, data from in-document solutions or from decentralized systems.

Fifthly, with respect to the state of the art, arXiv has recently made available "related DOI's" which refer to other DOI's for articles, including peer-reviewed versions. See, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01519 .


Best regards,
Adam

From: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
Sent: Friday, October 7, 2022 3:20 PM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>; public-credentials@w3.org
Subject: Re: Cryptographic Peer-reviewing Solutions

If the reason for the cryptography is to support restricted access to a limited set of individuals, then PDF (ISO 32000-1) supports (has for about 20 years now) the ability to encrypt a PDF to one or more X.509 certificates - thus enabling only those users with the matching private keys (and associated passphrases) to open the PDF.   The PDF can also have various digital rights applied, so that the author could choose to (for example) allowing commenting.

Leonard

From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>>
Date: Friday, October 7, 2022 at 8:03 AM
To: public-credentials@w3.org<mailto:public-credentials@w3.org> <public-credentials@w3.org<mailto:public-credentials@w3.org>>
Subject: Cryptographic Peer-reviewing Solutions

EXTERNAL: Use caution when clicking on links or opening attachments.


W3C Credentials Community Group,

Hello. Has anyone explored centralized or decentralized cryptographic approaches to enabling groups of scholars or scientists to be able to peer-review one another's digital documents? Technologies with which to enable forms of both closed and open peer review are of interest.

I'm thinking about digital signatures, verifiable credentials, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and other technological topics with which to enable teams, groups, or communities of end-users to be able to peer-review their digital documents, e.g., PDF- and HTML-based articles.

Are these topics of any interest? Could anyone recommend any software projects or publications on these topics? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski