in a scientific publication, and go to a detailed, structured description of its generating computation, and even land precisely on the instruction that created the figure?
From there we could stroll up and down the computation tree and browse other parts of the same computation and other figures created by it. We could read the code, examine intermediate variables, understand the steps that took place, re-execute some parts, and retrieve the original dataset fed into the computation. In fact, what if we could move on to browse the original dataset’s own creating computations, and continue to tour computation world, all through an entry point provided by one figure of interest in a publication? The Verifiable Computational Research (VCR) is a discipline for computational research. It introduces the notion of Verifiable Result Identifier (VRI), which together with today’s advanced web infrastructure turns the above fantasy into a reality. The discipline allows researchers, publishers and publication readers to use the same tools they are already using, and requires only minor changes to these tools. While everyone are following their familiar workflow, a V
