Council for Independent Frontier Research
DOI is for papers.
RAI is for methods.
A Research Agent Identifier is a permanent, citable, executable reference to a scientific method — not a PDF describing how work was done, but the method itself, runnable for the next decade and beyond, under institutional guarantee.
Example record — 18.cifr/2016.chanda.grid-resiliency-metric/v1
A CIFR agent is your research code, sealed into an isolated, verifiable container and issued a permanent identifier — so the method you register today remains resolvable, invocable, and citable in 2040.
WHY CIFR EXISTS
Most published science cannot be reproduced.
In 2016, Nature surveyed 1,576 scientists. 70% had failed to reproduce another researcher's experiment. More than half had failed to reproduce their own. Ten years on, the frictions are unchanged: broken dependencies, vanished repositories, emails to authors who no longer reply.
The manuscript — a static description of how work was done — is no longer a sufficient unit of scientific record. The method must travel with the claim.
Research should run, not just read.
A NEW UNIT OF SCIENTIFIC RECORD
A DOI proves your paper exists.
An RAI proves your method runs.
The Research Agent Identifier is issued by CIFR under the 18.cifr prefix — modeled on DOI, governed by a registered nonprofit, designed to outlive any single platform. Each RAI resolves to an executable method: permanent, versioned, invocable, and auditable.
Where a DOI is a pointer to a document, an RAI is a pointer to a working piece of science.
FROM THE REGISTRY — LIVE RECORDS
Three records currently resolving.
Curated record — publishing soon.
Curated record — publishing soon.
Curated record — publishing soon.
These pages are reading live records from the CIFR registry.
REGISTRATION
From submission to permanent record.
Seal
Submit a repository, notebook, or script. CIFR captures your method in an isolated, dependency-locked container. The container operates without network access, which prevents environmental drift between runs.
Verify
Your method executes against CIFR's validation harness. Outputs, environment, and execution trace are committed to the provenance ledger.
Issue
You receive a permanent RAI. Anyone can cite it, invoke it, or compose it with their own methods — and every invocation is logged on a public record.
A method registered with CIFR today must be invocable in 2036. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.
What this means.
For you, the researcher
- Your method is cited when it is used, not merely mentioned in a bibliography.
- A permanent identifier that outlives broken GitHub links, lost container images, and abandoned lab websites.
- A public provenance trail: who invoked your work, when, with what inputs, and what result.
For science
- Methods become citable, invocable, and composable artifacts — portable across laboratories and decades.
- Impact is measurable by invocation, a stronger signal than citation alone.
- Reproducibility becomes an infrastructure guarantee, not a good-faith hope.
BEYOND REPRODUCIBILITY — WHERE THIS IS GOING
Methods compose.
Once a method holds an RAI, another researcher can invoke it as a building block in their own work. A forecasting model becomes input to a grid-resilience analysis; a protein-folding routine feeds a drug-screening agent. CIFR's runtime orchestrates execution; the provenance ledger records the lineage.
This is what executable science looks like.
THE GROWING RECORD
Recently minted.
The registry's first public records will appear here shortly.
Questions of record.
- What is a CIFR agent, and how is it different from an AI agent?
- A CIFR agent is a sealed, containerized research method — your code, frozen with its dependencies and data, addressable by a permanent identifier. It is not an LLM-based system and contains no generative model unless the published method itself is one.
- How does RAI relate to DOI, ORCID, and ROR?
- DOI identifies documents; ORCID identifies researchers; ROR identifies institutions. RAI identifies executable methods. The four are complementary; an RAI typically references its associated DOI(s) and ORCID author(s).
- What happens to my RAI if CIFR ceases to operate?
- CIFR's charter commits to archival handoff of the full registry to a partner institution, with a twenty-year minimum preservation guarantee. The registry and resolver are open-source; any party can mirror them.
- How does RAI handle method versioning?
- Each RAI carries an explicit version segment. Behavior-changing updates require a new version; prior versions remain permanently resolvable.
- Who can mint an RAI?
- Any researcher may register a method they authored or have permission to publish. Community reimplementations of prior work are also registrable under a distinct RAI linked to the original.
- Is the registry open-source? Where is the ledger?
- Yes. Source and ledger are public.
- Is CIFR free to use?
- Academic use is free in perpetuity. CIFR is funded by institutional memberships, philanthropic grants, and 80G-eligible donations. Access to the registry is not metered.
The method is the work.
Register yours — or browse what the field is building.