SciTeX Agentic Journal (scitex-agentic-journal)

ARA-native AI-reviewed open publishing on top of Clew.

Status: pre-alpha scaffold (v0.1.0-alpha). README + minimum package skeleton. M1 (submission gate) implementation pending — tracked under open issues.

What it is

scitex-agentic-journal is the journal substrate of SciTeX: a publication venue where AI agents — not volunteer reviewers — perform peer review, copy-edit, and publication-readiness work. Human authors still write and revise; AI agents read, run, verify, critique, and decide.

Concretely the package provides:

• A submission intake that ingests a manuscript bundle (LaTeX + claims + DAG + code repo + ORCID).
• Gate-1 structural checks (ORCID resolvable, code repo cloneable, Clew DAG present + verifying ≥1 claim).
• An agent review stage (Spartan/Qwen-class reviewer agents): reproducibility re-run, claim verification, novelty triangulation, methodology critique.
• An editorial decision stage (accept / revise / reject) backed by the review record.
• A publish hand-off to scitex-live-paper with a persistent ID (sandbox → Zenodo DOI → JaLC).

The package is not a new claim model and not a new manuscript format. It consumes Clew's claim/DAG model and emits Live Paper bundles.

What problem does it solve?

Traditional peer review is slow, opaque, volunteer-limited, and cannot keep pace with the preprint flood. Meanwhile AI agents can now read, run, and verify the entire research workflow — code, data, claims, provenance — in minutes. scitex-agentic-journal turns that capability into a publication venue with auditable AI-driven editorial decisions.

MVP loop

   submit → agent review → decision → publish

The MVP collapses the long pipeline into the smallest loop that is end-to-end useful:

1. submit — accept a manuscript bundle through CLI / MCP and persist it with provenance.
2. agent review — run a single reviewer agent against the bundle and persist its report.
3. decision — apply rule-based editorial logic over the review record → accept | revise | reject.
4. publish — emit a Live Paper bundle (accepted) or a revision packet (revise) and stamp a persistent ID.

Issues #2–#9 track this MVP loop. Post-MVP work (multi-reviewer panels, JaLC, reviewer dashboard, MCP server, AGPL/CLA polish) is deferred.

Architecture

+--------------+        Clew claim/DAG        +---------------------+
| scitex-clew  +----- (read, never owned) --->| scitex-agentic-     |
+--------------+                              |     journal         |
                                              |                     |
+----------------+   literature triangulation |  +--------------+   |
| scitex-scholar +--- (read) ---------------->|  | submission   |   |
+----------------+                            |  | intake (M1)  |   |
                                              |  +------+-------+   |
                                              |         |           |
                                              |         v           |
                                              |  +--------------+   |
                                              |  | reviewer     |   |
                                              |  | agent (M2)   |   |
                                              |  +------+-------+   |
                                              |         |           |
                                              |         v           |
                                              |  +--------------+   |
                                              |  | decision     |   |
                                              |  | engine (M3)  |   |
                                              |  +------+-------+   |
                                              |         |           |
                                              |         v           |
                                              |  +--------------+   |
                                              |  | publish (M5) +--+|
                                              |  +--------------+ ||
                                              +---------------------+
                                                                  ||
+-----------------+                              hand-off bundle  ||
| scitex-live-    |<------------------------------------------------+
|   paper         |
+-----------------+

+----------------+ reviewer dashboard surface
| scitex-hub     |<-- (optional Django app, M6)
+----------------+

The dependency direction is strict: data flows in only from scitex-clew / scitex-scholar, and flows out only to scitex-live-paper. The package hosts on scitex-hub but does not depend on it for review correctness.

Full pipeline (design target)

   submit (manuscript + project repo + Clew DAG)
      |
      v
   gate 1: ORCID + code repo + DAG completeness check
      |
      v
   gate 2: AI review (Spartan / Qwen-class reviewer agents)
      |     - reproducibility re-run + claim verify
      |     - novelty + literature triangulation (Scholar)
      |     - methodology critique
      |
      v
   gate 3: editorial decision (accept / revise / reject)
      |
      v
   gate 4: persistent ID
      |       (JaLC after incorporation; Zenodo DOI interim;
      |        sandbox-DOI for dev)
      |
      v
   publish -> Live Paper (`scitex-live-paper`)

Dependency direction

scitex-agentic-journal   --reads-->   scitex-clew         (claim model + DAG)
scitex-agentic-journal   --reads-->   scitex-scholar      (literature triangulation)
scitex-agentic-journal   --emits-->   scitex-live-paper   (rendered artefact)
scitex-agentic-journal   --hosts-on-> scitex-hub          (reviewer dashboard, auth)

• The claim data model is owned by scitex-clew (decision locked in). Agentic-journal is a consumer — it does not define new claim types; it reads VerificationStatus, the DAG, and the hash-verified provenance graph.
• After acceptance, agentic-journal hands the manuscript bundle (LaTeX + claims + DAG + assets) to scitex-live-paper for rendering.
• Hosting (web UI, Auth via Gitea, app surface) is provided by scitex-hub. Agentic-journal ships an optional Django app for the reviewer dashboard.

First milestone (M1, "submission gate")

1. Define Submission schema (manuscript bundle + ORCID + code repo URL + clew project path).
2. Implement gate 1 only: structural checks against the submitted bundle — no AI review yet.
   • ORCID resolvable
   • code repo cloneable
   • clew DAG present and clew claim verify returns ≥ 1 green claim
3. CLI: scitex-agentic-journal submit ./paper/ returns gate-1 verdict (pass / fail + reasons).
4. No mocks. No silent fallbacks. Real errors with guidance.

Subsequent milestones (tracked as issues):

• M2 — AI review (Spartan Qwen reviewer agents): reproducibility re-run, claim verify, novelty triangulation, methodology critique.
• M3 — Editorial decision engine (accept / revise / reject) over the review record.
• M4 — Persistent ID (sandbox → Zenodo → JaLC).
• M5 — Publish hand-off to scitex-live-paper.
• M6 — Reviewer dashboard on scitex-hub (Django app).
• M7 — MCP server for agents.

Installation

pip install scitex-agentic-journal           # CLI + library
pip install scitex-agentic-journal[mcp]      # + MCP server for agents
pip install scitex-agentic-journal[dev]      # + dev/test extras

From source:

git clone https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/scitex-agentic-journal.git
cd scitex-agentic-journal
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/

Demo

The submit / review / decide / publish subcommands return structured errors until their tracking issues land. The version + help paths are the existing smoke surface:

$ scitex-agentic-journal --version
scitex-agentic-journal, version 0.1.0-alpha
$ scitex-agentic-journal --help
Usage: scitex-agentic-journal [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  ARA-native AI-reviewed open publishing on top of Clew.
  See `scitex-agentic-journal <subcommand> --help`.

Commands:
  decide   Apply the editorial decision engine to a review record.
  publish  Hand off an accepted submission to scitex-live-paper.
  review   Run a single reviewer-agent against a persisted submission.
  submit   Submit a manuscript bundle through Gate-1 (orchestrator stub).

Library demos for the Gate-1 ORCID resolver (#2) and code-repo cloneability check (#3) live under examples/.

4 Interfaces

This package exposes four stable interfaces, each tracked by its own milestone:

Part of SciTeX

scitex-agentic-journal is part of SciTeX.

Four Freedoms for Research

0. The freedom to run your research anywhere — your machine, your terms.
1. The freedom to study how every step works — from raw data to final manuscript.
2. The freedom to redistribute your workflows, not just your papers.
3. The freedom to modify any module and share improvements with the community.

AGPL-3.0 — because we believe research infrastructure deserves the same freedoms as the software it runs on.

Upstream dependencies:

Downstream consumer:

Status

Pre-alpha — design + scaffold only. Implementation tracked under issues.

License

AGPL-3.0-only.

_{Part of SciTeX — open, AI-reviewed publishing for science.}