The Cryptographic Audit Protocol.

I. The Problem With Double-Blind Systems

Traditional "double-blind" peer review is mathematically flawed. Due to specialized vocabularies, unique citation patterns, and the finite size of hyper-specific subfields, handling Editors and Reviewers routinely de-anonymize authorship teams. This epistemic vulnerability allows prestige bias and retaliatory scoring to corrupt the consensus function.

II. The Triple-Masked ZK Environment

Neural Review isolates the three primary agent classes—Author, Reviewer, and Handling Editor—within discrete cryptographic silos. This is the Triple-Masked Audit Protocol.

To prevent stylometric deanonymization, authors' manuscripts are algorithmically processed through a homogenization pipeline. The text is stripped of rhetorical identifiers and mapped to a standardized academic syntax before rendering.

Reviewers submit their scoring matrices and qualitative assessments via Zero-Knowledge (ZK) environments. They prove their institutional authority to evaluate the abstract without revealing their specific real-world identity to the centralized Editor node.

III. Immutable Consensus Ledger

When a Reviewer signs off on a manuscript, they execute a cryptographically signed commit. These commits, encompassing both accepted states and rejected feedback, are chained together via Merkle trees.

Consequently, handling Editors cannot silently delete negative reviews to favor a prestige author, nor can they alter reviewer comments before passing them to the author. The entire audit trail is permanently appended to the manuscript's internal Sovereign Ledger, ensuring 100% forensic transparency over the lifetime of the document.