Scientific evaluation relies on a self-reinforcing loop: universities evaluate researchers by journal prestige, journals evaluate papers partly by institutional affiliation, and no one evaluates the research directly, because direct evaluation at scale has lacked the necessary infrastructure. This paper proposes a protocol that provides that infrastructure by treating every research program as a version-controlled repository. A paper becomes a tagged render of the research at a point on its timeline – a frozen snapshot forked to a journal so the community can confirm the findings. The protocol introduces fork-based submission, automated compliance gates, attributed reviewer commits, provenance chains, and AI-traceability by design. A commit-reveal privacy primitive enables researchers to establish cryptographic priority through public commit hashes while retaining control over content disclosure. A Research Wiki layer, adapting Karpathy's (2026) three-layer knowledge pattern, creates five types of git-timestamped intellectual work proof: discovery, priority, attestation, derivation, and independence. The protocol has been implemented across 25 research papers, with a working compliance-gate validator and machine-readable claim specifications. Existing publishing reforms improve the rendered artifact; this protocol makes the research itself structurally transparent. Includes paper.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard.
Dmitry Zharnikov (Sun,) studied this question.