  Peer-review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific
publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very
costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not
remunerated by the journals but is also not openly recognized by the academic
community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher. Therefore,
scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality, and fairness.
Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that
rewards scientists for peer-reviewing other scientists' work and that builds up
trust and reputation. We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart
contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open
anonymous peer-reviews on Ethereum. If requirements are met, peer-reviews will
be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality.
To promote ethical behavior and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified
mechanism that allows the whole community to evaluate the peer-reviews and vote
for the best ones.
