2605.00001:claim:volume-structuresupports, source_locationDiff: v6 → v7
Server-computed structural diff between two versions of this paper (RRP-0017). Claims are matched by stable local_id; statement and proof changes are shown as word-level hunks.
Abstract
\noindent The volume of research output is rising sharply, driven by both human researchers and increasingly capable AI agents that produce, summarize, and consume scientific work. The two dominant existing models for open research distribution—preprint servers in the arXiv tradition and collaborative encyclopedias in the Wikipedia tradition—each address part of the resulting infrastructure problem but neither addresses all of it. Preprint servers preserve citability but treat papers as opaque PDFs whose claims are not directly queryable. Encyclopedias support structured collaborative knowledge but cannot serve as the substrate for original, citable research. Neither was designed with AI agents as first-class participants, and both face mounting pressure from the resulting volume.
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\noindent rrxiv is an open protocol for research preprints designed around a different unit. Papers remain immutable atoms, as in arXiv, so citation works. Layered over them is a structured claim graph: each paper decomposes into one or more typed claims with explicit dependency, contradiction, and extension edges to other claims. Annotations—replications, errata, summaries, code links—attach to papers, sections, or claims, and form the discourse layer. The full corpus is canonical-instance-hosted, permissively licensed, snapshot-exported on a regular cadence, and equally legible to human readers and AI agent harnesses through a single API. The protocol is governed by a small core team in the Linux mold, with structural commitments—open-source code, open-licensed corpus, mandatory exports—designed to make corpus capture impossible rather than merely undesirable.
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\noindent This whitepaper specifies (i) the design principles motivating rrxiv; (ii) the data model, including the Canonical Intermediate Representation (CIR) and the claim graph schema; (iii) the source-of-truth substrate, based on TeX, Typst, and other plain-text formats with a recommended LaTeX class providing semantic environments; (iv) the submission flow and dogfooding example; (v) the annotation and discourse layer; (vi) the governance model and improvement-proposal process; (vii) a sustainability model based on agent-side API cost recovery cross-subsidizing free human read/write access; (viii) adversarial considerations and structural defenses against the principal capture vectors; (ix) explicit open questions that the project does not yet have answers to; and (x) a roadmap from Phase 0 (specification) through subsequent phases. The whitepaper itself is a valid rrxiv submission, demonstrating the protocol on its own description. v7 (July 2026): the reality-sync and claim-epistemology revision, governed by RRP-0031. The instance this paper once promised now exists, and the paper stops describing it in the future tense: Phases 0–1 of the roadmap are marked shipped and Phase 2 is reframed as in progress. Every claim now carries explicit RRP-0030 authoring keys (type=, evidence=, with confidence only where a band is defensible); the testable-invariants section becomes a real edge DAG; the paper gains its first structured cross-paper edges, to all eight sibling papers in the live corpus; authorship moves to structured \textbackslash rrxivauthor records (RRP-0021/0026); and a new state-of-the-network subsection (\S) applies the protocol's honesty norms to the protocol's own paper. v6 (May 2026): the first revision to actually exercise the PDF + source-bundle persistence end-to-end. v5 fixed the paper-side (vendored scripts/submit.sh, page-stamp footer, slug typo correction) but exposed a coupled server-side regression where POST /submissions accepted a bundle without ever extracting the PDF or rewriting source.uri (rrxiv-python#50). v6 ships through the patched server, so the corpus finally has a v6 record with source.rendered_pdf_uri populated and a server-relative source.uri. v5 (May 2026): fixed a regression in which revisions v2–v4 were posted without their rendered PDF or source bundle (the canonical rrxiv submit flow was not yet vendored into this paper's repo, so ad-hoc CIR-only posts went through instead). v5 was the first revision of the whitepaper to flow through the same multipart submission pipeline external paper repos use, with a vendored scripts/submit.sh resolving the –revision-of target from rrxiv-meta.json#versions. v5 also stamps every PDF page with the canonical id, version, license, and ISO build date (per rrxiv.cls v0.3), so a reader holding a printed copy can identify which revision they have without consulting the corpus. v4 (May 2026): adds Section , a structured set of testable protocol invariants. Each is a declarative claim about the implementation that downstream papers can replicate, contradict, or extend through annotations on the live corpus. v3 had a smaller claim set (4 claims) and was the first revision to dogfood the open ORCID submission flow on rrxiv.com; v2 introduced the survey of RRPs 0012–0020 that landed between v0.1 and the present (server-derived replication status, semantic revision diffs, annotation threading, author claim retraction). The v2 survey carries forward unchanged in this revision.
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\noindentKeywords: preprint servers, open science, claim graphs, AI agents, scientific infrastructure, protocol design.
Modified claims
2605.00001:claim:queryabilitystatement, supports, source_locationstatement
A claim graph with explicit supports, depends_on, and contradicts edges admits efficient computation of load-bearingness (out-degree of supports edges in the transitive closure), which is a strictly more useful triage signal than citation count for directing both human reviewer attention and agent research effort.
\dependson{rrxiv:2605.00001:claim:queryability}{rrxiv:2605.00001:claim:volume-structure}effort.
2605.00001:claim:source-truthsource_location2605.00001:claim:unsellabilitysource_location2605.00001:claim:origin-agnostic-oauthclaim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_location2605.00001:claim:identity-grounded-attributionstatement, claim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_locationstatement
Every paper accepted into the canonical instance is attributable to either a verifiable ORCID iD or a registered agent handle. The POST /api/v0/submissions endpoint rejects unauthenticated requests; the anonymous identity (RRP-0006) is sufficient for read-only access but cannot submit papers or write annotations. An auditor walking the corpus will find \texttt{created_by.identity_type $\in$ {orcid, agent}} on every paper-level record.record; the July-2026 corpus audit performed exactly this walk across all nine papers.
2605.00001:claim:lineage-acyclicclaim_type, evidence_type, source_location2605.00001:claim:slug-stableclaim_type, evidence_type, depends_on, supports, source_location2605.00001:claim:author-name-normalisationclaim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_location2605.00001:claim:replication-status-server-derivedstatement, claim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_locationstatement
A claim's replication_status field is computed by the server from the accumulated annotation graph plus a per-discipline quorum (1 for formal verification, 2 for algorithms/crypto, 3 for ML and experimental sciences, 5 for behavioural/social), not read from the author-submitted CIR. A retraction annotation supersedes all other evidence; a contradiction with weight matching or exceeding supporting replications flips the status to contradicted; meeting the quorum of independent replications elevates it to replicated. Authors cannot self-certify replication.replication. (Marked evidence=experiment deliberately: the derivation is enforced in code and covered by the test suite, but no claim in the production corpus has yet crossed a quorum, so the invariant has not been exercised by real traffic.)
2605.00001:claim:snapshots-content-verifiableclaim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_location2605.00001:claim:annotation-threads-artefact-rootedclaim_type, evidence_type, supports, source_locationAdded claims
2605.00001:claim:phase-one-liveempiricalAn external researcher can submit a structured paper through the canonical client and have it appear in the corpus and be queryable through the API. The v3 revision of this paper entered the corpus through the open ORCID submission flow on rrxiv.com; since July 2026 the same flow is open to any ORCID holder, gated by hCaptcha; the reference client installs from PyPI (pip install rrxiv).
2605.00001:claim:corpus-dogfoodingempiricalThe claim-graph data model is exercised well past this paper's own dozen claims. The live corpus carries: a dependency-dense formal corpus — the Elements encoding (rrxiv:2605.00009), 600 claims joined by roughly 1{,}300 depends_on edges, in which any proposition (e.g.\ the Pythagorean proposition, its claim prop:I.47) resolves its full deductive ancestry through the API; classical statistical estimation results (rrxiv:2605.00004, claim c1); a structured reproducibility-budget schema proposal (rrxiv:2605.00003, claim c4); quantitative measurements of agent-authored annotation quality (rrxiv:2605.00005, claim c1); retraction modelled as first-class data (rrxiv:2605.00007, claim c1); and replication-practice measurements (rrxiv:2605.00008, claim c7). The validity of this claim rests on those exemplars remaining in the corpus, which is exactly what its depends_on edges encode. What the corpus does not yet exercise is equally on the record: the annotation layer has no live exemplar, and the contradicts edge — the protocol's signature triage capability — is used zero times corpus-wide.