Call for Papers

Decentralized Science (DeSci) & the Future of Health Research

BHTY invites original research, reviews, case studies, and perspective pieces for a dedicated to the theme Decentralized Science (DeSci) and its transformative implications for healthcare research, clinical innovation, and biomedical knowledge creation.

DeSci represents a paradigm shift — applying blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, tokenomics, and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance to reshape how science is funded, conducted, validated, published, and shared. As the leading international open access journal amplifying platform approaches at the intersection of healthcare and distributed ledger technology, BHTY is uniquely positioned to chronicle, critique, and advance this emerging frontier.

We actively welcome reports of failed experiments, null results, and negative findings. In a rapidly evolving field, documenting what does not work is as vital as documenting what does. Researchers should not hesitate to submit rigorous accounts of unsuccessful DeSci implementations — these contributions are peer reviewed with equal seriousness and editorial priority.

SCOPE AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

Submissions addressing any of the following — and intersecting areas not listed below — are encouraged:

Foundational DeSci Infrastructure

Decentralized research funding protocols and DAOs
On-chain IP registration, licensing, and NFT based IP-NFTs
Smart contract frameworks for scientific agreements
Tokenomic models incentivizing open peer review
Decentralized preprint and publication platforms
Provenance tracking for research data and datasets

Clinical Research and Trials

Blockchain-enabled clinical trial management and integrity
Patient consent mechanisms and self-sovereign identity
Decentralized patient recruitment and retention
Immutable audit trails for trial data and adverse events
DeSci approaches to rare disease and orphan research

Data Science, AI and Interoperability

Federated learning over distributed health data
AI and generative AI within DeSci ecosystems
FHIR, HL7, and blockchain interoperability architectures
Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving data sharing

Governance, Regulation and Ethics

DAO governance models for research institutions
Regulatory pathways for decentralized research protocols
Ethical frameworks for token incentivized participation
GDPR, HIPAA, and compliance in DeSci architectures
Community governance of biomedical data commons

Security, Privacy and Cryptography

Cryptographic approaches to health data sovereignty
Secure multi-party computation in biomedical research
Privacy-preserving genomics on distributed ledgers
Threat modeling for decentralized research infrastructure

Applied and Translational DeSci

Supply chain integrity for research materials and drugs
Revenue cycle automation via smart contracts
Immersive technologies (AR/VR/XR) in DeSci workflows
Network technologies supporting distributed research
Clinical computing platforms for decentralized studies
Patient-owned data marketplaces and data unions

Negative Results and Critical Perspectives

Failed DeSci pilots: analysis and lessons learned
Critical assessments of hype vs. evidence in DeSci
Barriers to adoption: organizational and cultural factors
Environmental and equity critiques of blockchain research

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts must conform to the BHTY manuscript preparation guidelines including:

For DeSci platform or protocol studies, authors are encouraged to provide open access to smart contract code, architecture specifications, or GitHub repositories.
Structured abstracts (Background, Methods, Results, Conclusion) are required for empirical submissions; unstructured abstracts for perspectives and commentaries.
Human subjects research must include IRB/ethics committee approval numbers; animal research must confirm IACUC compliance.

Submissions are accepted through the BHTY online portal on a rolling basis. There is no submission deadline — manuscripts are reviewed and published on an ongoing schedule.

Why Submit to BHTY?

Leading international open access venue dedicated to blockchain and DLT in healthcare
Rapid, rolling publication — August and December 2026 issue publication dates
Indexing in major health informatics and medical databases including PubMed/PMC, Scopus, and more.
Global readership spanning clinicians, researchers, technologists, and policymakers
Dedicated editorial support for interdisciplinary and cross sector submissions
Active promotion through BHTY's professional network and partner organizations
No article processing charges for failed experiments and editorials
More details here.

posted 3.29.2026

Ethics of AI Agents and Agentic AI in Healthcare

Governance, Accountability, and Trust in Autonomous AI Systems

The rapid emergence of AI agents and agentic AI — autonomous, goal-directed software entities capable of multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use — marks one of the most significant shifts in artificial intelligence since deep learning. In healthcare and life sciences, these systems are already being deployed for clinical decision support, diagnostic reasoning, drug discovery, patient triage, care coordination, and administrative automation. Unlike traditional AI tools that respond to a single prompt, agentic AI systems act, adapt, and make sequences of decisions with real-world consequences for patients, clinicians, and health systems.

This shift demands rigorous scholarly attention to the ethical, governance, and accountability frameworks that must govern agentic AI in high-stakes healthcare settings. Agentic AI introduces qualitatively new challenges: diffusion of moral responsibility across human-AI-system boundaries; opacity of multi-step autonomous reasoning chains; risk of misaligned objectives compounding across agentic pipelines; and the challenge of meaningful human oversight when AI acts at speeds beyond human review cycles. The role of blockchain and decentralized technologies in providing verifiable audit trails, consent management, and trustworthy governance infrastructure for autonomous AI is central to this issue.

This special issue of Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY) invites original research, systematic reviews, conceptual frameworks, case studies, and policy analyses that advance understanding of how agentic AI can be designed, deployed, audited, and governed responsibly in healthcare. Submissions bridging the technical, ethical, legal, and governance dimensions — and those exploring distributed ledger technologies as enabling infrastructure for trustworthy autonomous systems — are especially encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

Ethics and Moral Accountability of AI Agents

Responsibility attribution — where does accountability lie when an AI agent causes harm in a clinical setting?
Ethical frameworks for autonomous AI clinical decision-making (principlism, deontology, consequentialism applied to agentic AI)
Bias, fairness, and equity — detecting and mitigating discriminatory outcomes in autonomous healthcare AI agents
Explainability and transparency in multi-step agentic reasoning chains — when and how must an AI agent explain its actions?
Informed consent in the age of AI agents — can patients meaningfully consent to care mediated by autonomous AI?

Governance and Regulatory Frameworks

Regulatory approaches to agentic AI in healthcare: EU AI Act, FDA guidance, MHRA frameworks, and international harmonization
Lifecycle governance — pre-deployment evaluation, post-market surveillance, ongoing monitoring, and decommissioning of AI agents
Multi-stakeholder governance models — roles of patients, clinicians, developers, regulators, and payers in agentic AI oversight
AI agent certification and assurance — standards and audit mechanisms for healthcare AI agents
Cross-border governance of agentic AI in global health — jurisdictional challenges and international policy frameworks

Human Oversight and Control

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) and human-on-the-loop (HOTL) design patterns for high-stakes healthcare AI agents
Meaningful human oversight when AI agents operate at speeds or scales exceeding human review capacity
Corrigibility, interruptibility, and override mechanisms for deployed healthcare AI agents
Trust calibration between clinicians and AI agents — avoiding over-reliance and under-utilization
Clinician autonomy and professional responsibility in AI agent-augmented care delivery

Blockchain and Decentralized Technologies for AI Agent Governance

Blockchain-based audit trails for AI agent actions — immutable records of autonomous AI behavior in clinical settings
Smart contracts for AI agent governance — encoding ethical constraints and operational boundaries in executable rules
Decentralized consent management — patient-controlled access permissions for autonomous AI acting on health data
Verifiable AI agent provenance — using distributed ledgers to certify training data, model versions, and deployment history
Federated learning and decentralized AI for privacy-preserving agentic healthcare systems

Multi-Agent Systems and Agentic Pipelines in Healthcare

Orchestration and coordination of multiple AI agents in clinical workflows — managing emergent behavior and conflict resolution
AI agent interoperability across health information systems, EHRs, and institutional boundaries
Security and adversarial robustness of multi-agent healthcare systems — prompt injection, agent hijacking, cascading failures
Multi-agentic systems in clinical trials — automation, oversight, and ethical considerations

Patient Safety, Privacy, and Rights

Patient safety frameworks for autonomous AI in clinical decision-making — risk assessment and incident response
Privacy-by-design for AI agents processing sensitive health data — differential privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, secure enclaves
Patient rights in AI agent-mediated care — rights to explanation, contestation, and human review of AI agent decisions
Empirical and case study research on real-world agentic AI deployments — lessons learned, ethical challenges, and governance solutions applied

Timeline: December 2026 Issue

Milestone	Date
Manuscript submissions due	30 June 2026
First round of reviews completed	31 August 2026
Revised manuscripts due	31 October 2026
Second round of reviews completed	30 November 2026
Publication — December Issue	December 2026

Accepted papers may be published in the August issue should authors wish for an earlier publication date.

Submission Details.

Manuscript Preparation Details https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/authors-submission
A COVER LETTER MUST BE SUBMITTED. Indicate Ethics of AI Agents and Agentic AI in Healthcare as the Theme Issue title in the cover letter.

Submission Portal Upload your manuscript through the journal Submission Portal at https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Note: APC will apply unless your university or organization has a Publish and Read Agreement on file.

Editors-in-Chief

Jennifer Hinkel, Founder & President, Sigla Sciences, and Managing Director, The Data Economics Company, USA

Umit Cali, MSc, PhD, Professor of Digital Engineering for Future Technologies, University of York, UK

Lead Editors

Prof. Muthu Ramachandran, BSc MSc PhD FBCS FHEA SMIEEE SMACM

BHTY Advisory Council, Principal Research Consultant, Forti5 Technologies Ltd, UK; Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of South Africa (UNISA); Adjunct Research Faculty, Lincoln University College, Malaysia

linkedin.com/in/muthuuk | amazon.com/author/muthu | muthu.ramachandran@forti5.tech

Tomer Jordi Chaffer, Researcher, McGill University – Faculty of Law

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordichaffer/?originalSubdomain=ca | Jordi.chaffer@mail.mcgill.ca

posted 3.13.2026

2026 General Call for Papers

Editorial Mission: BHTY publishes platform approaches in healthcare and distributed ledger technology research and innovations across the spectrum of healthcare information systems, data science, AI and generative AI, interoperability, consent mechanisms, privacy preservation, security, clinical trials management, supply chain management, revenue cycle automation, immersive technologies, tokenomics, governance, regulation, network technologies, clinical computing, cryptography, and failed experiments in this evolving specialty field.

Topics of Interest

Healthcare Information Systems & Interoperability

Blockchain-enabled health data sharing and exchange
Electronic health records management and integration
Cross platform interoperability solutions
Healthcare data standards and protocols
Decentralized health information networks

Data Science, AI & Generative AI

AI powered clinical decision support systems
Generative AI applications in healthcare
Machine learning models on distributed health data
Privacy preserving AI and federated learning
Multi-agentic systems in health ecosystems
Digital twins and synthetic data generation

Privacy, Security & Consent

Privacy preserving cryptographic methods
Patient consent management mechanisms
Zero knowledge proofs in healthcare
Secure multiparty computation
Identity management and authentication
Data sovereignty and patient control

Clinical Applications

Clinical trials management and data integrity
Precision and personalized medicine platforms
Genomics and "omic" medicine applications
Remote patient monitoring and telehealth
Clinical computing and workflow automation
Medical imaging and diagnostic platforms

Supply Chain & Operations

Pharmaceutical supply chain traceability
Medical device tracking and authentication
Counterfeit prevention and product verification
Cold chain monitoring and compliance
Hospital asset management
Revenue cycle automation and operational efficiencies

Emerging Technologies

Smart contracts for healthcare automation
Immersive technologies (VR/AR/XR) in medical training and care
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) integration
Tokenomics and healthcare incentive mechanisms
Decentralized clinical trials
Web3 and decentralized healthcare applications
Decentralized science (DeSci) platforms and research funding
Digital assets and health tokens
NFTs for medical credentials, research, and patient engagement
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in healthcare

Governance, Regulation & Standards

Regulatory frameworks and compliance
Healthcare governance models
Policy implications and recommendations
Standards development and adoption
Legal and ethical considerations
International regulatory harmonization

Failed Experiments & Negative Results

Lessons learned from unsuccessful implementations
Critical analysis of limitations and barriers
Reproducibility studies and validation challenges

Article Types

Original Research Articles: Novel findings and empirical studies
Systematic Reviews: Comprehensive literature analyses
Technical Reports: Implementation details and system architectures
Case Studies: Real world applications and outcomes
Opinions, Perspectives & Commentaries: Expert opinions, thought leadership, and future directions
Blogs: Accessible insights for broader audiences
Failed Experiments: Negative results and lessons learned (no APC)

Why Publish with BHTY?

100% fully open access continuous publication
Amplification across 145+ countries
Indexed in PubMed Central, SCOPUS, DOAJ, and more
35,000-45,000+ monthly impressions via Google Analytics
Amplification across 12 social media outlets including LinkedIn
Press releases distributed via news wires

Author-Friendly Policies

No submission fees
No page charges (including color graphics)
APC: $1,285 USD ($850 for enrolled university students)
NO APC for failed experiments, editorials, or blogs
Waivers available up to 100%
Authors retain copyright (CC-BY-NC)
No embargoes on sharing

Fast & Rigorous Review

Average 6 days to first editorial decision
Average 102 days to acceptance
Average 112 days to publication
Fast track publications available at no extra charge
World class peer review board
24 hour to 1 week response time for author inquiries
Elective Transparent Peer Review (TPR) offered

Quality Metrics

Scopus CiteScore 2024: 2.4
Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) H-Index: 9
34% acceptance rate in 2025
Rigorous, engaged editorial team

Enhanced Dissemination

Published in 4 formats: PDF, XML, HTML, ePub
Citation tracking with Altmetric and Dimensions
Video abstracts accepted
Article infographics may be published
Targeted email announcements to international readership
Annual Editors Best Article Award eligibility
Archived on Portico, Lockss, Crossref

Submission Guidelines

Include a cover letter with submission – see Manuscript Preparation here.
Manuscript must be a Word document following BHTY Manuscript Preparation guidelines
Maximum 10,000 words including references and images
References must be in Vancouver style

How to Submit

Submit your manuscript through our online portal: https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Publication Schedule

April 2026
August 2026
December 2026

Contact

For inquiries about manuscript submissions, editorial policies, or special issues:

John Russo Jr, PharmD, Managing Editor

j.russo@partnersindigitalhealth.com

info@partnersindigitalhealth.com

posted 12.23.25

2025 Call for Papers - Special Issue

Reimagining Healthcare with AI, Blockchain, and Digital Twins: Privacy, Security, Legal Tech, and Decentralization Aspects

Submission Deadline: September 15, 2025

Journal: Blockchain in Healthcare Today Platform Approaches Journal (BHTY)

About the Special Issue

Editors invite high-quality submissions for a special issue of Blockchain in Healthcare Today Platforms Approaches Journal (BHTY) exploring the convergence of blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins, and multi-agentic models in transforming the future of healthcare and the broader health and life sciences industry. With the rise of generative AI (GenAI) and digital legal technologies, healthcare systems are evolving toward more intelligent, secure, and decentralized infrastructures.

This issue aims to bridge the technological, ethical, and legal aspects of these transformations—fostering dialogue across disciplines, including digital health, cybersecurity, data privacy, AI governance, and healthcare law.

Scope and Topics of Interest are below, but not limited to:

Blockchain-enabled health data sharing and interoperability
Multi-agentic systems and decentralized AI architectures in health ecosystems
Generative AI for clinical decision support, diagnostics, and digital therapeutics
Smart contracts and legal automation in healthcare delivery
Digital Twins in Healthcare: Design, deployment, and ethical implications
Privacy-by-design and cybersecurity frameworks for health systems
Federated learning and secure multiparty computation in medical AI
Legal tech, explainable AI (XAI), and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, EU AI Act)
Governance models for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in healthcare
Tokenomics, incentives, and ethical AI use in health data ecosystems
Case studies: AI+Blockchain applications in hospitals, insurance, pharma, or public health
Risk assessment, trustworthiness, and liability in AI-driven medical systems

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: September 15, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: November 15, 2025
Publication Date: December 2025 (Rolling publication possible upon acceptance)

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your manuscript via the journal’s submission portal, following the author guidelines. When submitting, please indicate in the cover letter that your manuscript is intended for the Special Issue on AI, Blockchain, and Digital Twins in Healthcare.

Upload papers to the Submission Portal at https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/about/submissions

Page limit: 5 to 7 pages limit

No APC will be charged if submitted during April. BHTY announced waiving APC fees for accepted submissions for submissions received in April only.

Manuscript Preparation Requirements at https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/authors-submission

Editors-in-Chief

Umit Cali, MSc, PhD, Professor of Digital Engineering for Future Technologies, University of York, UK

Jennifer Hinkel, Founder & President, Sigla Sciences, and Managing Director, The Data Economics Company, USA

For all editorial board members click here.

posted 4.5.25