What a journal like a scientific journal provides as a service is record keeping, timestamps really. The word journal comes from diurnal, meaning daily, as in, daily records. The word in other languages, German for example, is zeitschrift, meaning literally time ("zeit") + writing ("schrift"), and the Swedish word is is "tidsskrift", the same root as the German word, and also literally "time-writing". Records that can be traced over time.
There have been advances in record keeping in the past decade, and I have secured my recent thesis on the Ethereum world computer, backed by 50 billion USD, using what I call "proof-of-thesis". It is also secured on EOS under account "paranthropus", and Bitcoin using OP_RETURN.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xf005524280ed7f45716b98c1b3b5a76dfd8886b22951c911f6c56687ee0cf19d