My suggestion for published scientific papers would be to introduce a cryptographic hash to ensure forever integrity of the related data.

I'm not sure if this would relate to what you are developing here though, because it seems you are aiming more at the pre-publication phase where people are actively changing things?

But if a hash were included in the text of the original published paper then - for example once it was in a printed journal -then it could not be changed.

The paper would not need to contain a hash for every piece of data. There could just be a single hash of a text file that itself is a list of hashes for each related data file.

Then the data that was used to write the paper would be crystallised forever and could not be retrospectively manipulated.

And it is a very simple concept. Anyone could later download the data files and check the hashes for themselves.

That is where we are headed for sure - our version control allows very granular addressing of content (i.e. an equation or figure). We haven't quite got to the hashing stage yet, because we aren't quite sure what all fits in the content, is the author, date, license also hashed in there? Also right now the way we store our content is still evolving pretty fast as it is more than just a text file etc. that we are storing.

Would love other pointers/thoughts if you have them.

I think this is a really powerful feature for sure.