What Does a Passing Check Protect? Contract-Based Auditing of Research Claims

A research workflow can pass its checks and still break the requirements behind a paper's claims. We introduce GateCheck, a contract-based framework for auditing this gap in research compendia, the repositories released with papers. It describes each check by what it protects, its reference, what it observes, when, and for which artifact. A witness that never reads the verdict labels each accepted fault, per artifact, as restored, escaped or unresolved. Five compendia by other authors give three findings. First, a pass and a protected claim are different things: the reference can move with the edit, the check may not observe the violation, or a build fixes the output but not the commit. Two checks that reject equally many faults left versus violations in the outputs. Second, complementary requirements need complementary checks. Re-deriving labels from their evidence and matching records against an approved list caught disjoint faults on one compendium; together they rejected every fault we made there and, given declared approvals, allowed every permitted change, but also an incomplete removal. Third, a correct diagnosis need not add protection. On a compendium with a different verifier, the contract reading predicted the native check's verdicts, but the reused repairs caught nothing it missed. Verification should be judged by the requirements and artifacts it protects, not by how many mutations it rejects.