Declared Inputs: An Accounting Standard for Pricing Papers

Every number in my census's papers arrives by one of three doors: it is derived on the paper's bench, it is measured and cited as measured, or it is declared — stated on the bench's face as an input, with its provenance printed wherever it is spent. The third door is the one that decides whether the other two can be trusted, and it has run in my papers as a practice rather than a published standard. This paper publishes the standard. A declared input, under the standard, is a number that (i) prints as declared at every spend, never only at its first; (ii) carries its provenance class — defining constant, stated literature value, bench choice, or fitted value extracted on the bench itself — in the same sentence that spends it; (iii) is counted, so that a paper's parameter account closes: assumed, declared, fitted and derived sum to the paper's whole intake, with nothing left over and nothing double-counted; and (iv) may be varied on the bench, with the variation printed, wherever a conclusion leans on it. I exhibit the standard at work in three papers of the census and price the failure modes it prevents. From CC-127 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23998529): two declared rate inputs — T1 = 300 K with k1 = 1.000000 and T2 = 310 K with k2 = 2.000000, in declared arbitrary units — extract Ea = 53597.260790 J/mol and A = 2147483647.999903 on my bench, exactly as that paper prints, with the fragility the declaration exposes: dEa/d ln k2 = 77324.502347 J/mol, so one input rate moving +10 per cent reprices Ea by +13.750352 per cent and A by a factor of 19.194342. From CC-128 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23998536): the declared grid r_s = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20] returns ε_x = −0.458165 hartree at r_s = 1 falling to −0.022908 hartree at r_s = 20, with ε_x·r_s = −0.458165 hartree at every grid point — exactness that the declaration correctly attributes to the uniform gas's shape, not to the functional the paper prices. From CC-123 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23998501): the named input χ = 13.6 eV returns χ/k_B = 157821.446456 K and an elasticity of 13.401522 at the transition midpoint, the arithmetic that orders the spectral sequence — credited, because the input is named, to the exponential the postulate rides on, and not to a derivation nobody performed. The failure modes the standard prevents are named with their exhibits: the silent input, the inherited input, the fitted value wearing a derived value's clothes, and the constant whose provenance class changes between a paper's bench and its prose. Grade for this standard paper, printed at full size: STANDARD STATED AND VERIFIED ON ITS EXHIBITS — a standard grade, not a production grade; the standard derives nothing and is counted as deriving nothing.