The Publisher’ Tutorial to publishing with VCR

VCR promotes new ways of scientific citation, knowledge discovery and knowledge integration. As a new content management and addressing system, intimately linked with traditional scientific publication and citation model, publishers with a VCR service offer content that is significantly richer.

For a journal, adopting VCR takes relatively little effort. It requires the publisher to

Run a VCR repository server
Recommend that all results (tables, charts, figures, p-values) in manuscripts would have VRI's.
Typeset the VRI’s as hyperlinks and URLs in electronic format, and as QR codes and URLs in printed matter.

What does it mean to run a VCR repository server?

The VCR repository is a robust, secure and scalable HTTP server able to handle heavy user traffic. It’s based on an Apache server and uses a modern NoSQL database backend. Existing publisher infrastructure can easily accomodate VCR repositories.

How do we check whether some result in a submitted manuscript has a VRI?

A verifiable result is submitted by specifying its VRI in the word processor file. Obviously, the VRI should be from the publisher's repository. No graphics or data file are attached to the menuscript. Instead, the result is typeset automatically by using a word processor VCR plugin. This is failsafe procedure: if the result has not been submitted to the publisher’s repository, the typesetting would simply not succeed.

What quality control is done by the repository?

The repository is monitoring the computation in real time and enforces creation rules set by the publisher. It rejects submission of computation content that violates these rules. Therefore, if a VRI can be retrieved from the repository, then it had been created according to the rules, and all computation content had been checked for consistency and validated.