The evidence contract

Verification runs in three stages, and each records its own result. The outcome is derived from all three rather than asserted.

execution     did the check run at all?
extraction    did the address resolve to exactly one value?
comparison    did that value agree with what the manuscript prints?

Separating them is what lets the report distinguish a paper that is wrong from a machine that is missing a tool. A single pass/fail cannot carry that distinction, and a reader who cannot see it learns to treat every failure as noise.

A claim

claims:
  - id: primary
    text: The treatment reduced the primary outcome
    registration: confirmatory
    evidence:
      - kind: metric
        artifact: results
        name: p_value
        pointer: /primary/p
        reported: "0.031"

Each piece of evidence points at one artifact and one address inside it, and the artifact carries a digest. Every value is fetched from the place the claim says it lives.

Registration

A claim declares one of three states, and not_applicable requires a note saying why:

registration	meaning
confirmatory	the analysis was planned before the data were seen
exploratory	it was not
not_applicable	the question does not apply, and here is why

For a confirmatory claim the tool also checks ordering — that the run started after the plan it names was registered — and records who attests to that timestamp:

self_recorded  <  git_remote  <  osf / zenodo  <  trusted_timestamp

A self-recorded timestamp establishes internal consistency, not chronology: someone who can write the plan digest and both timestamps after seeing results can manufacture an ordered history. Recording the authority makes that limit a field rather than a caveat, and lets a policy require better than the weakest one.

Policies

The same report is graded differently depending on what is at stake:

policy	unpinned artifact	unchecked evidence
exploratory	ignored	warning
publication	warning	warning, error if confirmatory
strict	error	error

A run that evaluated nothing is never a pass. Without that rule, a project with no evidence anywhere satisfies every other condition trivially.