Ask a lab to regenerate a figure from a paper they published two years ago and watch what happens. The script is on a former student's laptop. The data file has three near-identical versions. Nobody remembers which preprocessing was final. Reproducibility fails not from bad intent but from missing plumbing.
Provenance is attached, not archived
In Neutropic, every artifact — figure, table, report — carries its provenance with it:
- The exact code that produced it, runnable again in one click.
- The data snapshot it was computed from.
- The sources behind every literature-derived claim, cited inline.
There is no separate "methods folder" to maintain, because the artifact is the record.
Annotate and revise without losing the chain
Reviewers and collaborators can annotate any artifact and request changes. A revision reruns the pipeline from the annotated point, producing a new version that remembers its parent — so "final_v3_REAL" filenames disappear, and the history of a result stays inspectable.
Built for how verification actually happens
When a reviewer questions a result, you don't reconstruct the analysis — you open it. When a collaborator joins, they don't ask which script made Figure 2 — they click it.
Reproducibility shouldn't be a virtue you practice. It should be a property of the tool.
