ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Blockchain
Sec. Blockchain for Science
Self-Sovereign Identity for Verifiable Authorship Consent and Privacy-Preserving Conflict-of-Interest Screening in Academic Publishing: A Permissioned Blockchain Registry Approach
Provisionally accepted
Kamal Al-Sabahi*
Yousuf Khamis Al Mabsali- College of Banking and Financial Studies, Ruwi, Oman
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Academic publishing, integral to knowledge dissemination and scientific advancement, increasingly faces threats from unethical practices such as unconsented authorship, gift authorship, author ambiguity, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. While existing infrastructures like ORCID effectively disambiguate researcher identities, they fall short in enforcing explicit authorship consent, accurately verifying contributor roles, and robustly detecting conflicts of interest during peer review. To address these shortcomings, we present a standards-aligned, decentralized conceptual framework for ethical authorship validation. The design uses Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) with Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) 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 via zero-knowledge (ZK) techniques. A permissioned ledger acts as a trust registry for hashes and status bits (no personally identifiable information, PII, on-chain) and supports revocation. A stakeholder survey of researchers, editors, and reviewers indicates strong support for consent enforcement and privacy-preserving COI checks. We position this as a design contribution with formative empirical input to inform a subsequent prototype and evaluation.
Keywords: Authorship Consent, Conflict-of-Interest Screening, Decentralized Identifiers, Peer Review Integrity, Permissioned blockchain, self-sovereign identity, Verifiable Credentials, zero-knowledge proofs
Received: 23 Oct 2025; Accepted: 23 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Al-Sabahi and Al Mabsali. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kamal Al-Sabahi
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