I had a rejected journal submission show up again as a keynote conference presentation a couple of years later. To be fair, with that sort of thing we could have just had the exact same ideas and so forth, but it wasn't a common research topic, and there were suggestive dots easy enough to connect. Regardless, it raised all sorts of alarms about what might have actually happened, and I started thinking seriously about the value of non-peer-reviewed, completely open publishing just as a way of maintaining authorship credit. Even if everything were totally innocent, it was a bit unnerving about the attribution of ideas and everything.
I'm having major conflicts about academics as a career. It seems to get more and more insane every day.
So proof of original authorship is a big issue in academia? You could easily create timestamped proof of having created a particular document, so is the issue more an insitutional one? Pardon me if I make sense, I'm a complete outsider to this.
That would rely on everybody creating timestamped proof, otherwise you could claim ownership of any paper that hasn't been timestamped by timestamping it yourself.
Not all cases are clear-cut, especially where a plagiariser restructures the document, changes the wording, sources, etc..
So I don't think this is a problem that can be solved practically, or even theoretically. But there are certainly things that can be done to better counter plagiarism.
You could post a hash of the paper to a trusted host like Twitter at the point you submit it, and you could then refer to that for proof of authorship and priority at a future date.
You could, however what happens if an author does not post a hash? If I found someone else's paper without a hash, I could generate a hash of my own and claim authorship.
This idea would only work if everybody started securing some form of proof of authorship before sharing papers with anyone, which I don't quite see happening.
I'm having major conflicts about academics as a career. It seems to get more and more insane every day.