Why We Need One Transparent Rulebook for All Scientific Literature
Scientific knowledge no longer lives in separate boxes. What used to be divided into “official journals,” “books,” “preprint servers,” “web pages,” and now “AI outputs” has become a single, tangled space where ideas move freely across formats and platforms. Articles are discussed on social media, preprints drive clinical decisions, AI systems summarize and rank findings, and blog posts can influence policy as strongly as some peer‑reviewed papers. In this new reality, the old assumption that prestige of venue equals trustworthiness has simply broken down. Yet our rules and expectations have not caught up. We still judge a paper differently depending on where it appears, even when the methods and data are identical. We tolerate uneven standards for transparency, conflicts of interest, and accountability. We treat reviewers as invisible gatekeepers rather than authors of influential scientific work. And we are only beginning to think seriously about how artificial intelligence sy...