Truly anonymous paper submission and review scheme

Due to the flush development of academic research, a great deal of research papers have been published in conference proceedings and journals. However, these articles need to be inspected by some professionals in specific fields. It is the most important that the entire process of reviewing must be kept fair. However, the privacy of reviewers is not preserved because that the reviewers must sign their comments on the reviewed papers for some conference proceedings or journals. The leakage of the reviewers' identities will affect the fairness of paper reviewing. In addition, it is also necessary for the authors to show their names to the editors of conference proceedings or journals such that the inspection results may be unfair. Unfortunately, the solutions proposed in the literature cannot cope with the problems on fairness well. Therefore, in order to eliminate the above drawbacks, we formally analyze the paper review procedure to solicit the possible reasons that bring about these unfair results. Furthermore, we will present a generic idea which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components to achieve the fairness property and other key requirements in a paper review system. Finally, the security of the proposed scheme is also formally proved. © 2014, IIIA-CSIC. All rights reserved.