Designing Generative Relational Academic Infrastructure: A Protocol Framework for Collaborative Knowledge Evolution and Propagation

Scholarly communication transmits finished artefacts and discards the trajectory that produced them. This paper takes that discard as a design problem and specifies the requirements on an infrastructure that would retain the trajectory. The argument proceeds from one observation about the present condition: an artefact carried evidence of a producer's capacity because producing it was costly in a way that discriminated between producers, and the collapse of production cost removes the discrimination while leaving the artefact in place. Attention then moves to the record of how an understanding changed, which raises a second problem, since a record is as cheaply fabricated as the artefact whose function it inherits. The credibility of a trajectory record therefore rests on its distribution across parties who did not coordinate, and that is a matter for a protocol in place of a platform. The paper states the historical precedent for the displaced layer, concedes the substantial prior art in open research platforms, provenance standards and rationale-capture systems, identifies capture cost as the documented cause of the failure of the last of these, and derives sixteen requirements on any protocol that would succeed where they did not. It closes with an overview of an architecture satisfying those requirements, layered over existing repositories and specified in a companion paper.