Transparant and Trustworthy Artifact Life Cycle

In scholarly communication, alternative publication platforms are rising, offering services that are not tied to and function independently from traditional publishers. Decentralized and decoupled versions of value-adding services such as overlay journals, peer review and endorsement services are provided to the network. These alternatives address not only the massive monopolization of scholarly communication but also new demands for rapid distribution of scholarly artifacts in fields such as life sciences. They also accommodate for new publication formats such as data sets and source code that are beyond the traditional paper. Event Notifications provide an asynchronous point-to-point messaging protocol that acts as an interoperability layer between the nodes in such networks. Event Logs are a proposal to provide full transparency in the scholarly process by publishing public resources on each node containing lifecycle information pertaining to the scholarly artifacts in the network. Trust in Event Logs require some form of machine-verifiability because trust by reputation of each node is not scalable in large networks. This paper presents a pragmatic approach to building trust without relying on costly blockchain technologies, which lack sustainable long-term strategies. By using trusted archival nodes within Event Notification networks and Event Logs, we propose a decentralized, transparent, and trustworthy alternative to traditional scholarly communication systems.