MCRP as a bridge between evidence, decisions, and repair

Research positioning draft, 2026-09-25. The comparison below was checked against primary specifications and community documentation; retrieval scope appears in the source ledger. This is a proposed integration design, not a standards-conformance report, adoption announcement, or priority claim.

Question: When does an additional protocol help people use existing research artifacts without losing the boundaries of the checks and decisions behind them?

Answer proposed for testing: A small, portable reliance profile may help when one artifact supports several uses with different authority, evidence, freshness, and repair requirements. Where an existing workflow already conveys those facts adequately, the right result is a faithful adapter—or no additional layer.

The strongest positive proposition

An astronomer can correctly reproduce a catalog calculation without checking its calibration. A biologist can reproduce a contrast that does not identify a causal effect. An economist can verify a trial calculation that does not transfer to a new population. A legal scholar can verify citations without acquiring authority to decide an institution’s conduct. Each has contributed something useful. The problem arises when the contribution crosses an organizational boundary and its limits disappear.

MCRP proposes to carry those limits with the object: this exact claim, these performed checks, this intended use, this responsible decision maker, and these conditions for reconsideration. It also asks who has capacity to perform the promised follow-up. Offer → check → rely → amend is the human entry into that profile; it is not a claim that science follows four sequential states.

The seed is most compelling as a way to connect existing records. A successful deployment could preserve a laboratory’s internal system, a collaboration’s editorial process, and an individual’s preferred writing tools. The external record would make a particular use inspectable without requiring agreement on a universal score or one institutional theory of evidence.

What already exists—and should be reused

This overlap changes the research claim. “We separate review from publication,” “we preserve versions,” and “we disclose who did the work” are not sufficient novelty claims. RO-Crate even describes authorized workflow changes, and PCI RR already documents a condition-bearing review process. The proposed increment is a particular cross-system use profile and executable failure suite, not ownership of those ideas. A complete prior-art survey may identify still closer profiles.

An ORCID iD should be an identity reference, not a credential inferred from having an account; ORCID explicitly permits broad registration and records the source of connections. A CRediT contribution describes work, not appointment to a review panel. These are MCRP design inferences about correct use of those systems, not criticisms that either system failed its stated purpose. ORCID Trust, CRediT role taxonomy.

Semantic crosswalk: preserve meaning before translating names

The following mappings are design proposals. An adapter must keep the originating institution’s identifiers, scope, chronology, and authority; it must not infer consent or a scientific judgment from a successful import.

Preserve the original access and disclosure conditions too. A record someone may read is not necessarily theirs to republish. PCI’s FAQ, for example, distinguishes published recommended-review records from rejected reports that are not public. Use synthetic or permission-cleared material in an open adapter test. If a receiving public format cannot preserve a restriction, report that incompatibility or refuse the export rather than copying private content into public metadata. PCI review visibility.

For the offer mapping, COAR’s Request Review already distinguishes the resource landing page from the content item and uses Offer with ReviewAction. For the check mapping, Announce Review places the review in object and the reviewed resource in context. An adapter must not reverse those identities or treat the notification as the report itself.

Announce Endorsement likewise announces an endorsement resource. It is a candidate carrier for an appropriate decision, not a universal encoding of every local reliance. A legal operational decision is not automatically a scholarly endorsement. Undo Offer withdraws a previous offer; it must not be used as if it retracts a published result or resolves every downstream reliance. Where no existing pattern fits, keep the typed amendment resource and mark the transport mapping unsupported.

PROV terms can express rich responsibility and revision relationships; they are not an instruction to erase old evidence when current use changes. In particular, do not equate a disputed scientific use with destruction of the underlying PROV entity. Nor does a delegated software activity prove independent governance. These are application semantics the adapter must preserve, using PROV’s extension points where needed. PROV-O qualified and expanded terms.

An RO-Crate profile is a plausible packaging route: the specification explicitly supports domain-specific conventions and extension vocabularies. A future MCRP profile should declare exactly which fields it requires, with examples and validation rules. That does not make the current plain JSON fixtures conforming RO-Crates; no such adapter or independent round trip has been demonstrated. RO-Crate profiles.

What would make the integration worth its cost?

The question is not whether these facts can be represented in an existing extensible vocabulary. Usually they can. The question is whether a shared minimal profile preserves consequential distinctions when information moves between people and systems—and whether doing so costs less than the mistakes it avoids.

Let a local decision record have semantic projection

$$\Pi(r)=(\text{target},\text{checks},\text{scope},\text{authority}, \text{purpose},\text{conditions},\text{validity},\text{repair}).$$

For an encoder $E$ and decoder $D$, the desired round-trip property is $\Pi(D(E(r)))=\Pi(r)$ on supported cases. This is a proposed test oracle, not a proved property of the current package. Unsupported fields must produce explicit loss information or rejection; they must not disappear into a generic positive badge. A receiving system may lack the original institution’s authority even when the record is translated perfectly.

A concrete integration test would send two uses of the same calibrated result: one permits numerical reconstruction, the other requires independent calibration. Then change only the calibration artifact. Measure which use becomes pending, which historical check survives, and which specialist work is reserved. Run the same test with a plain structured attachment. The new profile earns adoption only if it preserves more relevant meaning at acceptable total labor.

Capacity is part of the proposed decision contract, not a solved standards gap. For each person and skill, review, supervision, amendment, and appeal commitments must draw on the same available resources. Existing systems can represent tasks and costs; MCRP’s research opportunity is to test whether binding those commitments to particular uses prevents silent oversubscription. The dossier’s elementary models expose overload and shared-error cases, but supply no field evidence that this profile improves them.

Three cases where existing methods are enough

1. A computational artifact needs packaging and rerun provenance. If the user only needs inputs, software versions, outputs, and responsible contributors, an existing research package plus execution record can answer the question. Adding a reliance ceremony would impose labor without a new decision boundary. RO-Crate already describes software and file-production history. Provenance guidance.
2. A reader wants the review history and accepted plan of a registered report. If the existing process already supplies the relevant version, conditions, reviews and deviations, point to those records. A duplicate MCRP acceptance would create a reconciliation problem. A wrapper becomes useful only for a genuinely different downstream use. PCI RR workflow account.
3. A journal and repository only need to announce that a review exists. Use the existing COAR announcement and link to the actual review. No extra trust score or MCRP state machine is required. The narrower transport problem is already specified. Announce Review.

These are acceptance criteria for the research agenda. A protocol seed that can recommend its own omission is easier to integrate than one that demands every existing workflow be renamed.

Domain entry: one useful bridge per audience

These are proposed invitations to collaborate, not assertions that those groups have adopted MCRP. No venue eligibility or available review capacity follows from the comparison. A community can retain its existing authority and attach one experimental receipt to a synthetic case before considering real data or decisions.

A staged adoption experiment

First, attach rather than migrate. Start with one shareable or synthetic artifact and a four-sentence human card. Link the original record; do not replace its identifiers, decision letter, or correction page. Permit a contributor to add only a scoped check. This stage needs no shared reputation economy.

Second, test a read-only adapter. Select one packaging/provenance combination and document semantic loss field by field. Include unknown scope, incompatible authority, withdrawn evidence, conflicting checks, and different institutional uses of one target. Pass/fail concerns preservation of meaning, not whether the JSON parses. Keep the original record available to its permitted audience alongside any projection; do not broaden its readership merely to make an adapter demonstration public.

Third, try a two-system synthetic exchange. Have separately developed adapters exchange an offer, check, decision and amendment. Duplicate or delayed notifications must not mint duplicate authority. A transport acknowledgment must not be displayed as acceptance of the scientific claim. No independent exchange has been completed in this release packet.

Fourth, ask humans whether the extra structure helped. Compare the bridge with a plain structured paragraph and the community’s current workflow. Count author, reviewer, facilitator, operator and correction labor; record refusals as well as completed work. If the simpler method preserves the same distinctions more cheaply, retain its vocabulary and drop unnecessary machinery.

Contribution and claim ledger

The public research invitation can therefore be concrete: bring a synthetic record or one you are entitled to share; help us preserve one consequential distinction when it travels. That is a smaller demand than joining a new review institution, and a sharper experiment than asking whether a new universal trust protocol sounds attractive.