The world of Bitcoin is an extremely broad realm filled with interests that intersect mathematics, cryptography, engineering, computer programming, law, finance and economics. Any of these subjects alone could lead a doctoral thesis so it’s no surprise that eventually an academic journal would appear to cover the topic of Bitcoin. Today, the University of Pittsburgh announced the launch of the Ledger, an aptly named academic journal dedicated to all things cryptocurrency and blockchain related.

The name “Ledger” is an obvious reference to the Bitcoin blockchain, a peer-to-peer globally distributed ledger that contains every bitcoin transaction ever made.

Ledger is described as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal for full-length original research that will be published on a quarterly basis by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.

The journal will be open-access to all readers and does not charge a publication fee to authors. Like any good academic journal, the Ledger will employ a transparent peer-review process and encourages authors to digitally sign their manuscripts (meaning that cryptography will be at work to prove authorship). And most interesting: manuscripts will be timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain.

As a first act, the editors of the Ledger have put out a call for papers to potential authors on the journal’s blog.

“This nascent field of research is highly interdisciplinary, sitting at the intersection of computer science, cryptography, economics, engineering, finance, law, mathematics, and politics,” the editors write in their blog post. ”Due to its novelty and wide-ranging nature, cryptocurrency studies have not sat comfortably in any traditional journal, and it is thus our aim to create the first purpose-built vehicle for the leading research in the field.”

The journal will provide a broad scope across the multitude of disciplines that Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technologies cover including:

• Development of new cryptocurrency computer algorithms/protocols
• Analysis of existing cryptocurrency algorithms/protocols
• New cryptographic methods for cryptocurrencies
• Network analysis of transactions on public ledgers
• Macroeconomic studies of cryptocurrencies
• Computer hardware design of new components
• Novel applications of cryptocurrencies
• Legal commentary on cryptocurrency uses
• Finance and the effect of decentralized ledgers on markets
• Analysis of proposed changes to the Bitcoin protocol

The deadline for the inaugural issue of the Ledger is December 31, 2015 and interested authors are suggested to consult the journal’s submission guidelines as well as the author guide [PDF].

Providing provenance with the Bitcoin blockchain

One of the takeaways of this academic journal is the promise that published articles will be timestamped with the Bitcoin blockchain. As a global distributed ledger of every bitcoin transaction, it is possible to date and tag a manuscript with a bitcoin transaction that forever links that particular publication with that transaction. As long as the Bitcoin blockchain exists, it would be possible to verify the date of publication against the manuscript’s tagged transaction.

The Bitcoin blockchain has numerous uses beyond providing the infrastructure for a global currency such as Bitcoin, as mentioned above, it can also be used to provide provenance or proof of existence for documents. By using the blockchain in this manner, the Ledger will become its own proof of concept for this use case.

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