## 1 Introduction  
Over the last decade, the adoption of new technologies for the daily management of Electronic Academic Records (EARs) have begun worldwide. However, EARs are mostly physically localized and institutes maintain separate EARs, which are not connected to each other. This causes difficulties for individuals when they transfer from one institute to another, and when they search for jobs or scholarships. In addition, the disconnection among institutes makes the learning data that were collected at previous institutes unavailable for analysis at current or future institutes. Essentially, a student may visit more than one university during his study, such as registering in one university while taking courses in another. The EAR will be stored in the database of the university that issued the record, which will be the only eligible university for editing it. This university also will be responsible for the record's maintenance and management. Students with access rights could query their EARs from different universities. Universities with access rights could query EARs of a common student from other university when there is a need. These situations cause a lack of coordinated data management and exchange. In other words, academic records are fragmented and isolated, rather than cohesive. The need for multiple access to the EARs has raised the interoperability challenges between students and universities, which pose additional barriers to effective data sharing. Additionally, as technology is constantly evolving, several advanced techniques are developed to violate digital privacy and security. Unfortunately, academic records are considered as major targets for information theft since they include private and sensitive information, e.g., the students' names, identity numbers, contact info and addresses. Therefore, the adoption of blockchain technology in managing EAR can be considered as one of the great breakthroughs of the last half a century. A blockchain is a distributed database solution which stores a continually increasing set of data verified and confirmed by participants. Researchers believe that the blockchain technology can shape the academic industry in everything from protecting academic records and offering better student packages to streamlining billing. Although the blockchain technology was first introduced through Bitcoin, extending its usage to non-financial applications is a mission for researchers. Managing EARs is one of the fields where the blockchain technology is believed to have considerable impact. The adoption of the blockchain in the managing EARs can be found in [1; 2] Research in this field is relatively new but increasing very quickly. Since a few studies propose to employ the blockchain for managing EARs, there is still a need for more research to better understand, characterize and evaluate its utility in EARs management systems. Therefore, this work introduces a fully functional framework for applying blockchain technology to EARs. In this work, the architecture of a blockchain-based framework applied to EARs is proposed. The proposed framework aims at providing interoperable, secure, and efficient access to EARs by universities, students and third parties while maintaining the students' privacy. In addition, this work proposes timed-based smart contracts whose design meets the demands of EARs. These contracts are employed in the blockchain for governing the transactions, monitoring the computations performed on the EARs through the enforcement of the acceptable usage policies and managing the use of data after transmission. Advanced cryptographic techniques are also adopted by the proposed framework for providing further security. In addition, since an EAR is a student's asset and not a cryptocurrency or a digital currency to be exchanged, unlike previously proposed blockchain-based systems for EARs, a new incentive mechanism is proposed.