RMP.Reference:3 - Research membership is not institutional status

Research can be performed in a company, public body, university, archive, community, independent practice or citizen group. Affiliation, grant, venue, publication intent, title or tool use is neither necessary nor sufficient. The boundary depends on a knowledge question unresolved in the qualified frame, a non-routine epistemic task of the whole inquiry under genuine uncertainty, a criticism-ready trace and a bounded communicable contribution. A constituent action or the execution of an already justified protocol may be routine within that inquiry.

The same activity can sit on either side. A seal test can be routine qualification or a challenge to the relation that makes acceleration relevant. A fully specified replication can examine a disputed claim without inventing a new protocol. In RMP.1’s paired assay case, the same procedure instead supports ordinary quality control when the task is to return a lot verdict under an accepted rule. Stream sampling can be monitoring or an inquiry into rival causes; source reading can answer the question or contribute to a source-critical design.