As with other online transfers, actually publishing/reading material has become the easy part and a whole pile of issues with security cropped up instead. (You

As with other online transfers, actually publishing/reading material has become the easy part and a whole pile of issues with security cropped up instead. (You don’t even really need a publisher to help with notoriety, if your stuff already shows up easily on Google.) I wish that Elsevier was being paid to solve a bunch of hard security problems but they seem to just be an expensive paywall. For example, do they provide a block chain or other trusted time stamp solution to make it easy to prove that a publication was “first” (no matter who decides to steal a file and copy/paste their own name as author instead)? I’d really like to see those kinds of things become mainstream defaults for publishing. Right now the main downside to just throwing files on random web sites is that they don’t typically have those security elements, making it easy to steal and hard to authenticate what you’re seeing.