Our verification protocols are openly published, subject to external audit, and grounded in internationally recognised standards for research integrity and document authentication.
Trustless by Design
You do not need to trust GlobalDocsHub to verify a document. Our cryptographic hashes can be independently computed from the original PDF and compared with the published fingerprint — without any involvement from us.
SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2, 256-bit). Chosen for its collision resistance and universal availability. Any standard SHA-256 implementation can independently verify a document fingerprint.
The cryptographic hash is computed within the GlobalDocsHub submission pipeline at the moment the document is received, before any human review. The timestamp and hash are stored together as an atomic record.
Document hashes are written to an append-only ledger. No hash record can be modified or deleted once written, even by GlobalDocsHub administrators.
Only documents published in journals indexed by CrossRef, PubMed/NLM, DOAJ, or Scopus are eligible. Conference abstracts, preprints without institutional review, and non-peer-reviewed documents are excluded.
Every submitted DOI is resolved against the CrossRef API in real time at submission. The returned metadata (title, authors, journal, year) is cross-checked against the submitted form data for consistency.
Any person or system can verify a document by computing the SHA-256 hash of the PDF and querying our public API: GET /v1/verify?hash={sha256}. A match returns the verified physician, timestamp, and original metadata.
Physician licence numbers are validated against national or international medical council registries (e.g. GMC, AMA, TTB, IMC). At least one active registration must be confirmed.
Registration requires an email address at a recognised medical institution domain. Free email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) are not accepted for physician registration.
Where an ORCID is provided, the public ORCID record is retrieved and the name, affiliation, and employment history are checked for consistency with the submitted credentials.
Any application where the registry check, email domain, and ORCID record do not all align triggers a mandatory manual review by a member of our verification team before the profile is published.
We re-validate physician credentials annually. Profiles where the underlying medical licence has lapsed are flagged and suspended pending renewal confirmation.
For physicians listing senior academic positions (Professor, Department Head, Research Director), institutional confirmation from the listed organisation is additionally required.
You can verify any document without using our platform interface. All you need is the original PDF and access to a SHA-256 hash tool.
Run SHA-256 on the original PDF file using any standard tool (OpenSSL, Python hashlib, online tool, or any SHA-256 implementation).
Submit the computed hash to our public verification endpoint. No API key required for document hash lookup.
A matching result returns the verified physician, submission timestamp, journal metadata, and DOI. No match means the document is either not in our index or has been modified.
Our verification protocols are reviewed annually by an independent panel of bioethicists, research integrity specialists, and medical informaticians. Annual audit reports are published openly.
All changes to our verification algorithm, eligibility criteria, or data retention policies are logged, versioned, and disclosed on this page with a minimum 30-day notice period before taking effect.