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Scientific output is outgrowing human review capacity, while AI is already used to draft papers. Authors scale with machines; reviewers largely do not. This asymmetry turns quality control into a bottleneck and increases the risk of both false rejection of high-novelty work and acceptance of flawed results. We propose Computational Research Assessment (CRA) as a discipline-level, method-agnostic agenda for machine-human collaboration in peer review. CRA rests on three principles: treat disagreement as a signal that triggers escalation instead of averaging; make every critique evidence-linked, reproducible, and contestable; and build a community immune system with open corpora, benchmarks, and red-team tests to surface gaming and bias. We map these principles to a co-review engine, a community commons, and theoretical foundations, and we outline near-term pilots and falsifiable commitments, informed by an emerging production-grade pre-review system deployed in the wild.

This paper argues that AI-assisted peer review should be verification-first rather than review-mimicking. We propose truth-coupling, i.e. how tightly venue scores track latent scientific truth, as the right objective for review tools. We formalize two forces that drive a phase transition toward proxy-sovereign evaluation: verification pressure, when claims outpace verification capacity, and signal shrinkage, when real improvements become hard to separate from noise. In a minimal model that mixes occasional high-fidelity checks with frequent proxy judgment, we derive an explicit coupling law and an incentive-collapse condition under which rational effort shifts from truth-seeking to proxy optimization, even when current decisions still appear reliable. These results motivate actions for tool builders and program chairs: deploy AI as an adversarial auditor that generates auditable verification artifacts and expands effective verification bandwidth, rather than as a score predictor that amplifies claim inflation.