The word journal comes from diurnal, meaning daily, as in, daily records. In Chinese the word is 日誌, 日, "the sun", same root as the common symbol for the Sun (☉), and 誌, "memorize, record". The word in German is zeitschrift, from time ("zeit") + writing ("schrift"), and the Swedish word is is "tidsskrift", the same roots as the German word, also translates to "time-writing". Records that can be traced over time. There have been advances in record keeping in the past decades, and with public-private key cryptography, hash-linking, and the Nakamoto consensus, a global infrastructure for secure records, with timestamps, is now available at a very low cost.
Journaling systems, regardless of domain, perform record keeping, and like any other "human-based trust system" there are very high costs, which means the content has to be filtered heavily. The reason a scientific thesis has to be reviewed in advance, is because journal-based record keeping has not had enough resources to record all ideas, and to then let the citation process be what proves wether or not a thesis (Ancient Greek θέσις, "a thing laid down") has value. With "technology based trust systems" such as Ethereum, the costs decrease massively, and that means that the laws of economics allow for other organizational structures.
