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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

The entire scam seems to be possible because there is no attempt at confirming the credibility of the people presuming to actually do the peer review. This type of decentralized authentication is precisely what PGP is particularly good at.

I have to imagine that it would be trivial to design a system which would simultaneously ensure that only the actual scientists would be able to peer review a paper based on other (recognized) scientists signing their keyring.

Journals of higher credibility (Nature, Cell, etc..) might even require reviewers that had more authority/signatures on their keys.

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If you image this is a trivial problem to solve, I think your imagination is not very good.

I'll quote the Bruce Schneier quote from the article. “There are almost never technical solutions to social problems.”

I don't know if the problem is trivial to solve, but designing a system which engages one element of the problem is trivial. The part that I was focusing on, was ensuring that any paper that claims to be Reviewed by a scientist actually was reviewed by that scientist.

Great quote. It gets me thinking about Facebook. FB is assuredly a massive technical solution to a social problem. I get Bruce's sentiment, but there are exceptions to this rule.

And what social problem does FB solve?

It's pretty good for staying in touch with people who you wouldn't regularly contact on an individual basis.

Yes, the social solution that Facebook presents is ideal for keeping in touch with a loose or geographically diverse set of real life friends. It is a technical solution to an admittedly simple social problem but a solution it is. Prior to Facebook I used to send graph emails, people would leave jobs, change email, etc etc. then came the cc replies, all out of order. A mess, solved well with Facebook, ad still really the only useful feature.

There's a registry that's trying to be a centralized identity database for all researchers called ORCID: http://orcid.org/ although I don't think any real-life authentication is really built in, so I think it's trivial to create an ORCID ID pretending to be someone else.

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