But you don't need the 'gatekeeper'. Imagine if you had a 'trustability' factor that people could cryptographically sign as themselves. You could build a 'trust web', where papers link to other papers by an author. That author's trust ratings could go up based on the citer's evidence.

There's clearly tech waiting to be built here, which might or might not be a startup.

There's already a "trustability" factor: it's called a name. When I search for a new paper and find something interesting, I look at the first author, the name of the PI, and the name of the university or laboratory associated with this paper.

If I'm familiar with the work of the first author then I already have an idea of how much I can trust his/her work. If I don't know this person then I look at the coauthors and especially the PI. If the PI is a heavy hitter in my field then there's my trustability factor right there. If I don't know the PI but I know the laboratory or university it's affiliated with then there's my third line of a trustability metric.

You don't consider the journal? You're a better man (or woman) than I am, if so. Otherwise agreed, reluctantly. This implicit trust is frequently manipulated to relax standards by experienced PIs, and in biomedical work that is a source of numerous problems.

In an ideal world, work from an unknown author would receive the same scrutiny as that from an established lab, and vice versa. Obviously this isn't the case, but the further we drift from it, the more likely we become to see sloppy results wasting everyone's time.

It can't just be about the narrative. That simply isn't science. That's storytelling, and confusing the two has caused a great deal of harm to science in the public eye.

I'd be lying if I said the journal didn't matter strictly speaking, but in general as long as it's a "real" journal (as opposed to one of those obviously fake journals I keep getting spammed by) then I don't really care.

Don't get me wrong though, just because the paper has a heavy hitter as the PI or even as first author, doesn't mean I treat the content with less scrutiny. It's more that I know my time is extremely limited so I'm more willing to spend more time dissecting a paper from an established first author or PI than an unknown person (unknown also meaning that it's not a paper someone recommended to me or a paper someone cited in another work).

It's more like, I'll _make_ time to read papers with certain authors on it because I know that they do good work. I'll also _make_ time to read something if it's published in Nature et al for example. But a random paper from a random author in a random group? It's not that I don't trust this person's work, it's more that I'm unfamiliar with that person's work and there's other things I could spend my time doing as well. I'll download the paper, throw it on my iPad, etc, and I'll get around to it eventually.

The problem is not about proving your identity, it is about having the facilities, funds and connections for publishing papers which the gatekeepers seem to have. Cryptographic signing solves a different problem. And it is the least concerning one.

Yeah, it also means minorities can be silenced via the majority. While this is good for protecting against incorrect/poorly researched work, it can also prevent novel ideas from gaining traction. Though, this problem exists in the system we have now.

A fully open system can have a ranking on articles and reviewers (voters). Wikipedia has no ranking on articles and no rankings of contributors/reviewers (at least initially). So these are different systems.

I'm convinced that random tourists vote can't have the same weight as recognized experts in the field who know the subject well and whose judgments are appreciated in their form and content. I'm convinced of this because it is the fundamental principle of the referee's review.