Transparent scientific usage as the key to success of the Virtual Observatory

Nowadays, Virtual Observatory standards, resources, and services became powerful enough to help astronomers making real science on everyday basis. The key to the VO success is its entire transparency for a scientific user. This allows an astronomer to combine "online" VO-enabled parts with "offline" research stages including dedicated data processing and analysis, observations, numerical simulations; and helps to overpass one of the major issues that most present-day VO studies do not go further than data mining. Here we will present three VO-powered research projects combining VO and non-VO blocks, all of them resulted in peer-reviewed publications.