Grounds of Restriction and the Governance of Disclosure in Generative Relational Academic Infrastructure

An infrastructure that records how understanding changes must be able to withhold. This paper asks on what grounds, and establishes that the answer determines not only whether a record is restricted but what may be withheld and what must still be disclosed. Four grounds are distinguished and shown to be irreducible to one another: rivalry, where a resource admits limited simultaneous use; hazard, where propagation of the content creates risk; exploratory vulnerability, where premature exposure suppresses the work; and appropriability, where excludability is required to fund production. Each restricts a different object and leaves a different residue, and the paper argues that a residue rule is what prevents a ground from justifying total silence. It then treats three difficulties the grounds create. Moving exploration into simulated environments relocates the governance problem from the allocation of instruments to the specification of models and benchmarks, and removes nothing. The component of a trajectory that carries its value in reuse is the same component that carries its evidential force and its hazard, so no design separates them and the paper states a trade-off in place of a solution. And records of research process are themselves an object of downstream interest, which raises the question of terms under which they may be reused. The paper closes with the governance of the grounds, the detection of misapplication, the treatment of jurisdictional variation, and the conditions under which the account would be shown wrong.