What is an evidentiary record?

An evidentiary record is an evidentiary safeguarding service for scientific journals and academic publishers: it fixes and preserves verifiable evidence of (1) what a publication established as its own at a given point in time (its cataloging metadata and identifying attributes) and (2) what an editorial team officially communicated (for example, acceptance letters, official statements, or certificates). That evidence remains available for consultation and cross-checking through a public verification code, in a clear, unambiguous way. In other words, it is also a tamper-evident record: if the underlying materials are manipulated, the system can detect and report it.

In its most complete form, an evidentiary record can incorporate an invisible cryptographic imprint embedded in a PDF—a signature-like mark at the cryptographic level. This imprint does not change how the document reads and is not visible to readers, but it enables a simple public verification: confirming who applied the mark (provenance within the system) and checking whether the file remains intact or was altered after it was marked. In practice, the verifiable document is the marked PDF returned by the system; if someone presents a different copy—without the imprint or with the imprint compromised by later modifications—the validator flags this explicitly, enabling the editorial team to defend its reputation. This is precisely what makes it a tamper-evident record in practice.