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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

There isn't, at all, and there never will be.

It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading.

Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.

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And that the authors don't have conflicts of interest. It's a decentralized unregulated reader-beware system. Even the good journals, say like Nature, are still just private companies that make up and then follow their own rules which they could change or ignore at will. Good science happens all the time, but, BS also gets published and, sadly, often gets more attention than the legit stuff because its more sensational. Its a tough problem with no easy solution.

Why not, though? After all, I'm sure a large university like MIT has a lot to gain from a site like this that promotes them to the top of the list as someone who publishes genuine papers.

They will be, and are, merely one among many. What grants MIT the authority to be The One Source Of Truth? Why? Who compels it?

Obviously the fruits of all human knowledge should be on a blockchain....

Although there are some journals that are "open access" and encourage mirroring their papers, most are not so and consider mirroring their articles to be piracy -- so until copyright law is reformed, there can never be a (legal) repository of the scientific literature, although projects like Sci-Hub exist just as things like Pirate Bay do.

> There never will be.

That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.

The issue is with the "for all" statement.

Never is a strong word, considering science publishing in the current form is barely a century old.

In the history of mankind, have everyone alive at one time all collectively agreed that That Thing Over There Is The One We Trust?

You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...

Don't see what trust you are talking about. There's no need to have "one thing". The important thing is that the research is public. If it lives in multiple repositories is irrelevant. Just have an aggregator query the 10 biggest of those and we're done. SciHub already achieves this without any support from institutions or universities, that ought to convince anyone that it's possible.

maybe a business opportunity for someone reading this thread

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