Reviewed-By Trailer: Sovereign-Portable Peer-Review Attribution for Content-Hash-Bound Artefacts
draft-morrison-reviewed-by-trailer-01
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| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual) | |
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| Author | Blake Morrison | ||
| Last updated | 2026-05-17 | ||
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draft-morrison-reviewed-by-trailer-01
Network Working Group B. Morrison
Internet-Draft Alter Meridian Pty Ltd
Intended status: Informational 18 May 2026
Expires: 19 November 2026
Reviewed-By Trailer: Sovereign-Portable Peer-Review Attribution for
Content-Hash-Bound Artefacts
draft-morrison-reviewed-by-trailer-01
Abstract
This document defines a trailer grammar for sovereign-portable peer
review as an extension of the identity-attributed commit grammar in
[COMMITS]. The grammar introduces one required trailer (Reviewed-
By:) and three optional companion trailers (Review-Stance:, Review-
Of:, Witnessed-By:) that bind a Sovereign-tier ~handle to a specific
act of review over a specific content artefact, cryptographically
signed using the Ed25519 mechanism of [COMMITS]. The mechanism
applies uniformly to git commits, document manifests, pre-prints,
patent disclosures, and any other content-addressable artefact.
Reviewer reputation accumulates on the sovereign handle rather than
on a publisher's platform, making reviewer trust portable across
journals, pre-print servers, and private review contexts.
Pseudonymous review for anonymous peer-review processes is supported
by permitting a Sovereign handle whose underlying party is concealed
through out-of-band key custody, preserving full cryptographic
verifiability of the review act without disclosing the reviewer's
underlying identity. The grammar is positioned as complementary to
CRediT [CREDIT], ORCID [ORCID], and DOI [DOI] attribution
infrastructure, not as a replacement for them.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 19 November 2026.
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Status of This Memo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Copyright Notice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Design Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.3. Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Identity Tier Taxonomy (Informative Reference) . . . . . . . 7
6. Trailer Grammar (Normative) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.1. ABNF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.2. Placement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3. Ordering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.4. Multiplicity Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Signature Algorithm (Normative) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.1. Algorithm and Signed Payload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.2. Rationale for Canonicalised-Content-Hash Signing . . . . 11
7.3. Signature Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8. DNS Resolution (Normative Reference) . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8.1. Reviewer Key Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8.2. Witness Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9. Verifier Behaviour (Normative) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10.1. Reviewer Reputation Portability . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10.2. Pseudonymity and Anonymous Peer Review . . . . . . . . . 14
10.3. Review Spam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
10.4. Review Bribery and Conflict of Interest . . . . . . . . 14
10.5. Witness Collusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
10.6. Content-Hash Forgery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
10.7. Key Custody at the Review-Signing Boundary . . . . . . . 15
10.8. Negative Attribution: Missing Review Disclosure . . . . 15
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11. Privacy Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
11.1. Pseudonymity as a First-Class Concern . . . . . . . . . 16
11.2. DNS-Linkability Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
11.3. Right to Withdraw a Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
12. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
12.1. Trailer Name Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
12.2. Stance Value Registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
12.3. No Other IANA Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
13. Relationship to Existing Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
14. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
16. Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
17. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
17.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
17.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1. Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on October 13, 2026.
2. Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
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3. Introduction
3.1. Problem Statement
Peer review of scholarly, scientific, and technical artefacts is
today captured by a small number of publishing intermediaries whose
editorial platforms hold the only durable record of a reviewer's
contribution. When a reviewer accepts an invitation from a journal,
the journal records the review against an internal reviewer profile;
when the reviewer moves to another venue, that record does not travel
with them. The mechanisms currently available for attaching reviewer
identity to a review are fragmented and individually inadequate:
* *Journal reviewer databases.* Each publisher (Elsevier, Springer
Nature, Wiley, PLOS) maintains an internal reviewer profile.
Reviewer reputation is platform-local. Migrating between
publishers re-roots reputation.
* *ORCID reviewer credit [ORCID].* ORCID supports a "Peer Review"
activity type in which a publisher asserts that a given ORCID iD
performed a review. The assertion is publisher-attested; the
reviewer cannot publish a review record without publisher
cooperation, and cannot cryptographically demonstrate the review
occurred without that cooperation.
* *CRediT contributor roles [CREDIT].* CRediT is a controlled
vocabulary for author-level contribution (conceptualisation,
methodology, writing, etc.). It is orthogonal to review: CRediT
describes what authors did, not what reviewers said.
* *Open-review initiatives (eLife [ELIFE-OPENREVIEW], F1000, arXiv
trackbacks).* These publish review content openly but continue to
locate reviewer identity inside the publisher's platform; leaving
the platform ends the review's discoverability.
* *COPE guidance [COPE].* Establishes ethical norms for peer review
but does not specify a format, attribution mechanism, or
cryptographic binding.
None of the above provides a provider-neutral, DNS-resolvable,
cryptographically-bound attribution mechanism for peer review that
lets a reviewer accumulate portable reputation outside any
publisher's platform.
3.2. Design Goals
This document defines a review-trailer grammar with the following
goals:
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1. *Provider-neutral.* No dependency on any specific publisher, pre-
print server, or editorial platform.
2. *Sovereign-portable.* Reviewer reputation accumulates on the
reviewer's sovereign ~handle rather than on any publisher's
platform. A reviewer who moves between journals, or between open
review and private review, carries their signed review history
with them.
3. *Content-bound.* Every review trailer is bound to a specific
content hash, so that a review of version 1 of a manuscript
cannot be silently re-attributed to version 2.
4. *Cryptographically verifiable.* Review attribution is bound by an
Ed25519 signature whose public key is reachable from DNS without
prior trust establishment, reusing the signature model of
[COMMITS].
5. *Pseudonymity-preserving.* Anonymous peer review remains a load-
bearing institution in some disciplines. The grammar supports
pseudonymous review by permitting a Sovereign handle whose
underlying party is concealed through out-of-band key custody,
retaining cryptographic verifiability of the review act without
disclosing the reviewer's underlying identity.
6. *Category-safe against misattribution.* Conformant parsers reject
cross-tier handle placement (e.g., an Instrument-tier handle in a
Reviewed-By: slot) as a structural grammar violation, not a
policy decision.
3.3. Scope
This document specifies:
* The Reviewed-By:, Review-Stance:, Review-Of:, and Witnessed-By:
trailer grammar in ABNF [RFC5234].
* Reuse of the Identity-Signature:, Identity-Key-Id:, and Identity-
Anchor: cryptographic trailers from [COMMITS].
* Multiplicity, placement, and ordering rules.
* Verifier behaviour for accepting, rejecting, and surfacing review
states.
* Security and privacy considerations specific to peer review.
This document does NOT specify:
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* The ~handle identity primitive itself, which is defined by
[MCPDNS] and incorporated by reference through [COMMITS].
* The normative tier taxonomy, which is defined in [COMMITS]
Section 3 and restated briefly in Section 3 of this document.
* An editorial workflow or an editorial decision algorithm. This
document defines an attribution grammar, not a review process.
* The economic rails for reviewer compensation. These are out of
scope; the anti-extraction posture of Section 8 is summarised at
the level required to motivate protocol-layer design choices.
4. Terminology
4.1. Requirements Language
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 RFC2119 [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
4.2. Definitions
Handle A ~-prefixed identifier per [MCPDNS], as incorporated into
[COMMITS]. Handles are the unit of identity addressing in this
document.
Sovereign Tier Handle Per [COMMITS] Section 2.2. A handle
representing a human individual or formal organisation with direct
cryptographic agency; holds its own private key; can sign.
Pseudonymous Sovereign Handle A Sovereign-tier handle whose
underlying real-world party is intentionally concealed. No
syntactic marker distinguishes a pseudonymous Sovereign handle
from a directly-identified one; the distinction is policy-level
and is held by the reviewer (or by an editorial intermediary)
through out-of-band key custody and assignment records.
Pseudonymous Sovereign handles sign with the same cryptographic
weight as any other Sovereign handle and are admissible wherever a
Sovereign handle is admissible.
Instrument Tier Handle Per [COMMITS] Section 2.2. A handle
representing an AI model, API endpoint, or tool class; holds no
key; cannot sign. Instrument handles are inadmissible in review
slots.
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Review Act A discrete act of evaluation performed by a Sovereign
reviewer against a specific content artefact identified by content
hash. A review act produces one trailer block.
Content Hash A cryptographic digest (SHA-256 or SHA-512, or the git
object hash family of [COMMITS]) of the canonicalised artefact
being reviewed. The hash binds the review to a specific manifest
state and prevents silent re-attribution across revisions.
Review Stance A controlled-vocabulary enumeration of the reviewer's
disposition toward the artefact. Permitted values are accept,
reject, revise, endorse, and dispute.
Witness A second Sovereign-tier handle that attests to having
observed the review act being performed, without taking review
responsibility. Used for signing ceremonies and high-stakes
review contexts (patent disclosures, adversarial reviews).
Conformant Verifier A consumer of review trailers that implements
the parsing, rejection, and signature-verification rules defined
in Section 7.
5. Identity Tier Taxonomy (Informative Reference)
The review-trailer grammar reuses the three-tier taxonomy defined in
[COMMITS] Section 3 without extension. Pseudonymous review is
expressed as a Sovereign handle whose underlying party is concealed
through out-of-band key custody (Section 2.2); no separate tier or
syntactic suffix is introduced.
+============+===============+================+=====================+
| Tier | Cryptographic | Admissible in | Examples |
| | Agency | Reviewed-By: | |
| | | / Witnessed- | |
| | | By: | |
+============+===============+================+=====================+
| Sovereign | Holds own | Yes | ~alice, |
| | key, signs | | ~example.com, |
| | | | ~reviewer-kappa |
+------------+---------------+----------------+---------------------+
| Bot | Scoped | No | ~example-deps.bot, |
| | delegated key | | ~example-triage.bot |
+------------+---------------+----------------+---------------------+
| Instrument | No key, no | No | ~example-model-1, |
| | signature | | ~example-model-2 |
+------------+---------------+----------------+---------------------+
Table 1
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The Bot and Instrument tiers are inadmissible in review slots because
peer review is an attestational act that requires cryptographic
sovereign agency. Conformant verifiers MUST reject cross-tier
placement per Section 7. Where AI-instrument involvement in review
drafting must be disclosed, the separate Drafted-With: trailer of
[COMMITS] SHOULD be used alongside Reviewed-By:.
6. Trailer Grammar (Normative)
6.1. ABNF
The following ABNF [RFC5234] defines the syntax of each trailer.
Implementations MUST accept exactly this grammar. Terminals not
defined here are imported from [RFC5234] or from [COMMITS]
Section 4.1.
``` reviewed-by-trailer = "Reviewed-By:" SP review-handle CRLF
review-stance-trailer = "Review-Stance:" SP stance-value CRLF review-
of-trailer = "Review-Of:" SP content-hash-ref CRLF witnessed-by-
trailer = "Witnessed-By:" SP sovereign-handle CRLF
review-handle = sovereign-handle sovereign-handle = "~" handle-label
; per [COMMITS] Section 4.1
stance-value = "accept" / "reject" / "revise" / "endorse" / "dispute"
content-hash-ref = hash-algorithm ":" hash-value hash-algorithm =
"sha256" / "sha512" / "git-sha1" / "git-sha256" hash-value = 1*HEXDIG
handle-label = 1*63( ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "_" / "." ) ; per
[COMMITS] ```
Pseudonymous review is grammatically indistinguishable from direct-
identity review: both forms appear as a sovereign-handle production.
Whether the underlying party is concealed is a policy-level property
held out-of-band by the reviewer (or by an editorial intermediary
that manages pseudonym assignment) and is not exposed in the trailer
grammar. Cryptographic verification proceeds identically in either
case.
The cryptographic trailers Identity-Signature:, Identity-Key-Id:, and
Identity-Anchor: are imported unchanged from [COMMITS] Section 4.1
and MAY appear in a review trailer block under the multiplicity rules
of Section 4.4 below.
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6.2. Placement
Review trailers MUST appear in the trailer/footer block of the
containing artefact. For git commits, this is the commit message
footer as defined in [COMMITS] Section 4.2. For document manifests
(e.g., a REVIEW.md review record, a manifest appended to a pre-print,
or a trailer block embedded in a patent disclosure submission form),
the trailer block MUST appear as the final block of the document,
separated from the preceding content by exactly one blank line.
A review trailer block is distinguished from a commit trailer block
of [COMMITS] by the presence of at least one Reviewed-By: trailer.
The two trailer types MAY coexist on the same artefact: for example,
a pre-print draft committed to a git repository MAY carry both an
Acted-By: trailer (attributing the commit) and a Reviewed-By: trailer
(attributing a subsequent review of the committed content).
Verifiers MUST parse them independently.
6.3. Ordering
Review trailers SHOULD appear in the following canonical order:
1. Reviewed-By:
2. Review-Stance:
3. Review-Of:
4. Witnessed-By:
5. Identity-Signature:
6. Identity-Key-Id:
7. Identity-Anchor:
Verifiers MUST accept trailers in any order, but emitters SHOULD
follow the canonical order to support diff-based review.
6.4. Multiplicity Rules
The following multiplicity constraints apply to a single review
trailer block:
* *Reviewed-By:* - Exactly one trailer per review block. A single
artefact MAY receive multiple review blocks over its lifetime (one
per reviewer); each block is independently attributed and
verified.
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* *Review-Stance:* - At most one trailer per review block. A review
takes exactly one stance at a time. If the reviewer's disposition
is nuanced (e.g., "revise and resubmit with stance leaning toward
accept"), the primary stance SHOULD be selected and the nuance
recorded in the review body, not in additional stance trailers.
* *Review-Of:* - At most one trailer per review block. A review is
bound to exactly one content-hash reference. A reviewer
commenting on multiple artefacts MUST emit a separate review block
per artefact.
* *Witnessed-By:* - Zero or more trailers per review block. Multi-
witness ceremonies (e.g., patent disclosure reviews requiring two
witness signatures) are permitted and expected. Multiple
witnesses form an unordered set; order of appearance is not
semantically significant.
* *Identity-Signature: and Identity-Key-Id:* - These two trailers
MUST appear together or not at all, per [COMMITS] Section 4.4.
When present, they bind to the most recent preceding Reviewed-By:
trailer in the block. Witness signatures, if required, are
recorded as separate trailer blocks each rooted at a Reviewed-By:
copy of the reviewer's handle or, alternatively, as witness-
specific signature pairs whose binding is specified by the
containing manifest.
* *Identity-Anchor:* - OPTIONAL in this version of the
specification. Implementations targeting transparency-log-
anchored review attribution MUST emit it.
7. Signature Algorithm (Normative)
7.1. Algorithm and Signed Payload
The signature algorithm is Ed25519 [RFC8032], reused unchanged from
[COMMITS] Section 5.
The signed payload is the raw byte representation of the
canonicalised-content hash of the artefact under review, as named in
the Review-Of: trailer. The algorithm named in the content-hash-ref
determines which digest is produced; the signed bytes are the raw
digest, not a hex-encoded string.
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7.2. Rationale for Canonicalised-Content-Hash Signing
The signature binds the reviewer's sovereign key to the exact
canonicalised content of the artefact being reviewed. This is
distinct from (and orthogonal to) the tree-hash signing model of
[COMMITS]. A review is a statement about content, not about commit
history; binding the review to the content hash preserves the
review's attribution across re-export of the artefact into different
containers (a pre-print re-uploaded to arXiv, the same manuscript
ingested by a journal's submission system, a patent specification
exported to PDF) as long as the canonicalisation yields the same
digest.
Manifest hashes (envelope digests of the publisher's submission
record) are deliberately NOT used as the signed payload. If a
publisher re-packages the artefact, the manifest hash changes while
the content is identical; binding reviews to manifest hashes would
invalidate reviewer signatures under routine publisher operations.
The authority over what constitutes "canonical content" rests with
the artefact's originator (the author) rather than with the
publisher; this preserves sovereign-portability of review.
7.3. Signature Format
Signature encoding follows [COMMITS] Section 5.4 without
modification. The trailer value is ed25519: followed by the
base64url-encoded 64-byte signature per [RFC4648].
8. DNS Resolution (Normative Reference)
8.1. Reviewer Key Resolution
The reviewer's public key is resolved via the _alter.<zone> DNS
record mechanism of [MCPDNS], exactly as specified in [COMMITS]
Section 6.1. No mechanism is provided for verifiers to learn, from
the trailer grammar or the DNS record alone, whether a given
Sovereign handle is operated by a directly-identified party or by a
concealed party under pseudonymous key custody. Where the
distinction matters editorially, it is conveyed through separate out-
of-band channels (editorial assignment records, conference of
record); the protocol layer does not surface it.
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8.2. Witness Resolution
Witness handles resolve identically to reviewer handles. Witnesses
MUST be Sovereign-tier handles. Although the grammar does not
distinguish pseudonymous from directly-identified Sovereign handles,
the witness role is expressly an on-the-record presence attestation;
witnesses SHOULD therefore use Sovereign handles whose underlying
identity is publicly resolvable by the intended verifier audience,
since concealed-party witnessing materially weakens the attestation.
9. Verifier Behaviour (Normative)
A conformant verifier MUST perform the following steps in order:
1. *Parse all review trailers from the trailer block.* Trailers
appearing outside the block MUST be ignored.
2. *Reject cross-slot category errors.* For each trailer, resolve
the handle's tier per [MCPDNS]. If any handle appears in a slot
other than its tier's admissible slot - for example, an
Instrument-tier handle in a Reviewed-By: slot, or a Bot-tier
handle in a Reviewed-By: or Witnessed-By: slot - the trailer
block is malformed and the verifier MUST reject it as a category
error. The error message SHOULD identify the offending trailer
by name.
3. *Validate the controlled-vocabulary stance.* If a Review-Stance:
trailer is present, its value MUST be one of the five stance
values defined in Section 4.1. Unknown stance values MUST cause
the review to be marked as malformed.
4. *Verify signatures, if present.* If Identity-Signature: and
Identity-Key-Id: are present, the verifier MUST:
a. Extract the key-id from the Identity-Key-Id: trailer. b.
Resolve the corresponding public key by querying the Reviewed-By:
handle's _alter record per Section 6.1. c. Compute or retrieve
the canonicalised-content hash of the artefact referenced by
Review-Of:. d. Verify the Ed25519 signature against that hash
using the resolved public key.
If signature verification fails, the verifier MUST mark the
review as unverified and MUST NOT report it as having a valid
sovereign attribution.
5. *Verify content-hash binding.* If Review-Of: is present, the
verifier SHOULD recompute the content hash from the artefact as
delivered and compare it to the value in Review-Of:. Mismatch
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indicates either artefact tampering or review attribution to a
different version; the verifier MUST surface this condition and
MUST NOT silently accept the review.
A conformant verifier SHOULD additionally:
1. *Distinguish review states in user-facing output.* Verifiers
SHOULD present three distinct states:
* verified - Reviewed-By: present with a valid Identity-
Signature: resolving to the published key AND content-hash
match.
* claimed - Reviewed-By: present without a signature, or with a
signature whose key cannot be resolved.
* hash-mismatch - signature valid but content digest differs
from Review-Of:.
Conflating these states is a security defect. Whether a verified
review is directly-identified or pseudonymous is not derivable
from the grammar; verifiers MUST NOT attempt to classify reviews
along that axis from the trailer block alone.
10. Security Considerations
10.1. Reviewer Reputation Portability
Once a reviewer accumulates a signed review history on a sovereign
~handle, that history is architecturally outside any publisher's
control. A publisher cannot unilaterally revoke, rewrite, or
platform-lock the reviewer's past signed reviews; a reviewer
migrating to a new publisher carries the chain of signed review acts
with them, and any verifier (a future organisation, a tenure
committee, a grant panel, an adversarial peer) can check the chain
end-to-end without publisher cooperation.
This is an intentional redistribution of control away from platform-
owned reviewer databases. Publishers remain the venue of record for
the editorial decision process; they cease to be the venue of record
for the reviewer's reputation.
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10.2. Pseudonymity and Anonymous Peer Review
A Sovereign handle whose underlying party is concealed carries the
same cryptographic weight as a directly-identified Sovereign handle
and is grammatically indistinguishable from it. This preserves
double-blind review where disciplinary norms require it, while still
producing a verifiable signed review chain. Publishers operating
anonymous-review workflows MAY mint or delegate a per-review
Sovereign handle for the reviewer, discard the assignment-to-real-
identity binding after the editorial process concludes, and rely on
the reviewer's own key custody to retain the signed record for future
portability.
The mapping between a concealed Sovereign handle and its underlying
party is the responsibility of the reviewer and, optionally, of the
editorial intermediary that facilitates the pseudonymous assignment.
This document does not specify that mapping mechanism;
implementations SHOULD document the assignment and custody model they
use.
10.3. Review Spam
A malicious sovereign MAY publish arbitrary signed reviews
attributing nonsense stances to arbitrary artefact hashes. The
mitigation is not a protocol-layer filter but the reputational cost
absorbed by the reviewer's own handle: spammy signatures accumulate
against the same sovereign key that carries the reviewer's legitimate
work. Verifiers SHOULD surface reviewer history to readers (e.g.,
"this handle has produced 12 reviews across 4 venues, of which 2
appear to be spam").
10.4. Review Bribery and Conflict of Interest
The grammar does not and cannot prevent a reviewer from being bribed
to produce an unjustified positive review, nor from concealing a
conflict of interest. Any economic counter-incentive is external to
this specification: implementations operating on incentive-aligned
rails can apply return-on-reputation invariants in which sustained
honest reviewing compounds the reviewer's earnings stream while a
single detected conflict-of-interest violation invalidates a
disproportionate fraction of that stream. Conflict disclosure is a
policy-layer concern; this protocol provides the truthful path for
honest reviewers, not a verification path against dishonest ones.
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10.5. Witness Collusion
Witness trailers attest to the presence of the reviewer at the review
act; they do not attest to the review's substantive merit. Two
witnesses colluding with a dishonest reviewer can still produce a
validly-signed multi-witness block over a fraudulent review. Witness
signatures therefore raise the cost of forgery but do not eliminate
it. High-stakes review contexts (patent disclosure reviews,
adversarial expert reviews) SHOULD require witnesses whose sovereign
identities have independent reputational stakes that are lost by
collusion.
10.6. Content-Hash Forgery
An attacker who can forge content with the same canonicalised hash as
an honestly-reviewed artefact can silently re-attribute the
reviewer's signature to forged content. The mitigation is the
cryptographic strength of the chosen hash-algorithm. Implementations
SHOULD default to sha256 or stronger and SHOULD NOT accept git-sha1
for high-assurance review contexts, in line with [COMMITS]
Section 8.4.
10.7. Key Custody at the Review-Signing Boundary
The same key-custody considerations as [COMMITS] Section 8.6 apply
unchanged: the signing operation MUST NOT occur in an unprivileged
process that does not mediate access to the private key. Signing
ceremonies for high-stakes reviews (patent disclosures, adversarial
expert reviews) SHOULD additionally bind the signing key to a
hardware authenticator and record the witness handles inside the
trailer block before the signature is produced.
10.8. Negative Attribution: Missing Review Disclosure
A publisher MAY elect to omit the Reviewed-By: trailer when
publishing a review in order to conceal the reviewer's identity even
after review acceptance; this is detectable by the reviewer
themselves (who retains their own signed copy) but not by third
parties. The grammar defined here provides the positive attribution
path; it does not force publishers to disclose reviewer identity
where editorial policy forbids it.
11. Privacy Considerations
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11.1. Pseudonymity as a First-Class Concern
Anonymous peer review exists because disciplinary communities have
judged the costs of fully-attributed review (retaliation, seniority
bias, disciplinary politics) to exceed the benefits. This document
accepts that judgment by treating pseudonymous Sovereign handles as
first-class cryptographic participants rather than as a degraded
fallback. Because pseudonymous and directly-identified Sovereign
handles are grammatically indistinguishable, implementations cannot
reliably classify a review as pseudonymous from the trailer block
alone; they MUST NOT emit operational warnings or user-facing nudges
that characterise a review as lower-trust on the basis of suspected
pseudonymity.
11.2. DNS-Linkability Risk
Every DNS resolution of a ~handle leaks the verifying party's
interest in that handle to the DNS path (recursive resolvers, on-path
observers, zone operators). Reviewers performing sensitive reviews
under pseudonymous Sovereign handles SHOULD host the handle's zone
with an infrastructure provider that is not the same entity as the
publisher; otherwise the publisher's own DNS telemetry can de-
pseudonymise review-assignment patterns.
11.3. Right to Withdraw a Review
A reviewer who wishes to withdraw a past review cannot unmake the
cryptographic fact of the signed block; they MAY publish a
superseding trailer block (a Reviewed-By: carrying a Review-Stance:
dispute against their own prior review hash) that records the
retraction without erasing the prior signature. The grammar is
append-only by construction; retraction is done forward, not by
deletion.
12. IANA Considerations
12.1. Trailer Name Registration
If a git/document trailer name registry is established by IANA (see
[COMMITS] Section 9.1), this document requests registration of the
following additional trailer names with reference to this
specification:
* Reviewed-By
* Review-Stance
* Review-Of
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* Witnessed-By
The cryptographic trailers (Identity-Signature, Identity-Key-Id,
Identity-Anchor) are registered by [COMMITS] and are not separately
registered here.
12.2. Stance Value Registry
This document requests IANA registration of a "Peer Review Stance
Values" registry, initially populated with the five values of
Section 4.1 (accept, reject, revise, endorse, dispute). The
registration policy is "Specification Required" (RFC 8126).
Extensions to the vocabulary MUST justify why the existing five
values are insufficient for the proposed use case.
12.3. No Other IANA Actions
This document requests no other IANA actions. The did:alter: URI
scheme, the identitylog:// URI scheme, and the Ed25519 signature
encoding are all inherited from [COMMITS].
13. Relationship to Existing Standards
The review-trailer grammar is intended to coexist with and complement
existing peer-review attribution infrastructure, not to replace it.
+=======================+====================+=====================+
| Mechanism | Purpose | Coexistence with |
| | | this spec |
+=======================+====================+=====================+
| ORCID peer-review | Publisher-attested | Complementary. |
| activity [ORCID] | review record | ORCID records THAT |
| | | a review occurred; |
| | | Reviewed-By: |
| | | records WHAT the |
| | | review was. Both |
| | | can coexist on the |
| | | same review act. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| CRediT contributor | Author-side | Orthogonal. CRediT |
| roles [CREDIT] | contribution | describes what |
| | taxonomy | authors did; |
| | | Review-Stance: |
| | | describes what |
| | | reviewers said. No |
| | | overlap. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| DOI attribution [DOI] | Persistent | Complementary. A |
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| | identifier for the | Review-Of: trailer |
| | artefact | MAY carry a DOI |
| | | alongside or |
| | | instead of a |
| | | content hash where |
| | | the DOI resolves to |
| | | an immutable |
| | | content manifest. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| COPE ethics guidance | Normative ethical | Orthogonal. COPE |
| [COPE] | framework for peer | specifies duties; |
| | review | this document |
| | | specifies |
| | | attribution |
| | | grammar. |
| | | Implementations |
| | | conforming to both |
| | | are recommended. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| eLife publish-review- | Open-review | Complementary. The |
| curate | editorial model | eLife model |
| | | benefits from |
| | | portable reviewer |
| | | identity; Reviewed- |
| | | By: provides the |
| | | portability without |
| | | requiring platform |
| | | lock-in. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| arXiv trackbacks | Informal linkage | Complementary. |
| [ARXIV] | between reviews | Trackbacks can |
| | and pre-prints | carry Reviewed-By: |
| | | blocks as machine- |
| | | readable review |
| | | records, upgrading |
| | | informal trackback |
| | | to cryptographic |
| | | attribution. |
+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
| Co-Authored-By: | Informal AI co- | Inadmissible in |
| Claude | authorship | review slots. AI |
| | convention | drafting assistance |
| | | on a review SHOULD |
| | | be disclosed via |
| | | the Drafted-With: |
| | | trailer of |
| | | [COMMITS], not via |
| | | co-authorship. |
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+-----------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
Table 2
Cryptographically-bound pseudonymous review - a Sovereign handle
whose underlying party is concealed and whose review acts remain
fully verifiable - is novel to this specification and has no analogue
in prior peer-review attribution infrastructure. ORCID records
publisher-attested facts about named identities; CRediT describes
author contributions; DOI identifies artefacts. None of the three
expresses the cryptographically-bound pseudonymous-reviewer role that
peer review has relied on for a century but has had no portable
attribution grammar for. That grammar is the load-bearing
contribution of this document.
14. Acknowledgments
The author thanks colleagues at Alter Meridian Pty Ltd for the
framing of sovereign-portable reputation as the governance wedge, and
the eLife open-review community and the arXiv operators whose prior
work on open peer review has made the grammar here possible.
Additional contributors will be named at review time.
15. References
15.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC4648] Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
Encodings", RFC 4648, October 2006.
[RFC5234] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, January 2008.
[RFC8032] Josefsson, S. and I. Liusvaara, "Edwards-Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm (EdDSA)", RFC 8032, January 2017.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119
Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, May 2017.
[COMMITS] Morrison, B., "Identity-Attributed Git Commits via Tier-
Structured Trailers", draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits,
work in progress.
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[MCPDNS] Morrison, B., "Discovery of Model Context Protocol Servers
via DNS TXT Records", draft-morrison-mcp-dns-discovery, work in
progress.
15.2. Informative References
[RFC7942] Sheffer, Y. and A. Farrel, "Improving Awareness of Running
Code: The Implementation Status Section", BCP 205, RFC 7942, July
2016.
[CREDIT] National Information Standards Organization, "CRediT
(Contributor Roles Taxonomy), NISO Z39.104-2022",
https://credit.niso.org/, 2022.
[ORCID] ORCID, Inc., "ORCID Public API", https://info.orcid.org/
documentation/, 2023.
[COPE] Committee on Publication Ethics, "Core Practices and
Guidance", https://publicationethics.org/core-practices, 2019.
[ELIFE-OPENREVIEW] eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd., "eLife's
Publish-Review-Curate Model", https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-
review, 2023.
[ARXIV] Cornell University, "arXiv.org - An Open-Access Archive",
https://arxiv.org/, 1991.
[DOI] International DOI Foundation, "The DOI Handbook",
https://www.doi.org/the-identifier/resources/handbook/, 2020.
[ANTHROPIC-COAUTHOR] Anthropic, "Co-Authored-By: Claude - convention
for AI-assisted commits".
16. Author's Address
Blake Morrison Alter Meridian Pty Ltd
Email: blake@truealter.com URI: https://truealter.com
17. References
17.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
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[RFC4648] Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
Encodings", RFC 4648, DOI 10.17487/RFC4648, October 2006,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4648>.
[RFC5234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5234, January 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5234>.
[RFC8032] Josefsson, S. and I. Liusvaara, "Edwards-Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm (EdDSA)", RFC 8032,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8032, January 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8032>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
[COMMITS] Morrison, B., "Identity-Attributed Git Commits via Tier-
Structured Trailers", 2026,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-morrison-identity-
attributed-commits/>.
[MCPDNS] Morrison, B., "Discovery of Model Context Protocol Servers
via DNS TXT Records", 2026,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-morrison-mcp-dns-
discovery/>.
17.2. Informative References
[RFC7942] Sheffer, Y. and A. Farrel, "Improving Awareness of Running
Code: The Implementation Status Section", BCP 205,
RFC 7942, DOI 10.17487/RFC7942, July 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7942>.
[CREDIT] National Information Standards Organization, "CRediT
(Contributor Roles Taxonomy), NISO Z39.104-2022", 2022,
<https://credit.niso.org/>.
[ORCID] ORCID, Inc., "ORCID Public API", 2023,
<https://info.orcid.org/documentation/>.
[COPE] Committee on Publication Ethics, "Committee on Publication
Ethics - Core Practices and Guidance", 2019,
<https://publicationethics.org/core-practices>.
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[ELIFE-OPENREVIEW]
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd., "eLife's Publish-
Review-Curate Model", 2023,
<https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review>.
[ARXIV] Cornell University, "arXiv.org - An Open-Access Archive",
1991, <https://arxiv.org/>.
[DOI] International DOI Foundation, "The DOI Handbook", 2020,
<https://www.doi.org/the-identifier/resources/handbook/>.
[ANTHROPIC-COAUTHOR]
Anthropic, "Co-Authored-By: Claude - convention for AI-
assisted commits", 2025,
<https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/co-authored-by-
convention>.
Author's Address
Blake Morrison
Alter Meridian Pty Ltd
Email: blake@truealter.com
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