Call For Papers: Blockchains and Decentralized Identification

2021-03-18

Ledger is currently seeking submissions for a special issue on the topic of Blockchains and Decentralized Identities and Identification (DID), to be published in the third or fourth quarter of 2021.

The trend toward digitization and the increasing number of digitized services have created a need for safe and secure digital identities and identification processes. On one hand, interoperability, regulations, and governance require something like a common framework for identities; on the other hand, data protection, self-sovereignity and heterogeneity call for decentralization—such as is provided by blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Worldwide, a countless number of projects are developing methods, interfaces, use cases, and standards for decentralized identities (DID) and identification. Examples are company-based projects and products such as Lissi or SelF (https://self-ssi.com/de/), EBSI hosted by the European Union (https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/EBSI), ESSIF (https://essif-lab.eu/), and sovrin (https://sovrin.org/) as an international identity project.

This trend has encouraged us—the editors of Ledger—to open a call-for-papers for research on or academic or scholarly solutions about blockchain-based, distributed ledger-based, or other decentralized identity systems.

There are no further restrictions on topics or use cases.

If you are:

  • Developing or contributing to a DID-solution using blockchains, ledgers, or other distributed systems, and
  • You have research work to be published
  • In a free, open-access journal*

then you are cordially invited to submit a scholarly paper or to volunteer to serve as a reviewer.

Submission Deadline: 30 April 2021
Timeline: The first round of reviews is expected to be finished by the end of June, with final versions of papers submitted in July and August or as revisions require. Publication is expected in the late third or early fourth quarter of 2021.

If you have questions or suggestions, please contact the principal editor of the special issue, Prof. Dr. Volker Skwarek, directly, at volker.skwarek@haw-hamburg.de. Please include "Blockchain and DID" in the subject of your email.

Submissions should be made through the usual submission process at ledgerjournal.org, with reference made to the special issue in your cover letter.


Submit at:
ledgerjournal.org
Submission Guidelines: 
http://ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/ledger/about/submissions
LaTeX Template:
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/ledger-journal-template/pxqkcbbgdfvj
Word Template: 
http://ledger.pitt.edu/ojs/public/journals/1/WordTemplate_01.docx

* Ledger is committed to the elimination of financial barriers to publication. We only charge fees from authors who volunteer that they have specific, institutional coverage intended to support open-access publication, as these fees allow us to cover some of the expenses of our independent and pro-bono work.