dft-publish-integrity

name	dft-publish-integrity
description	Rules for anything under papers/ in dawn-field-theory — published packages, DOIs, and citation metadata. Use before editing, moving, reformatting or repackaging any paper, running a repo-wide sweep that could touch papers/, or answering a question about which DOI to cite.

Published packages are frozen

A DOI points at a snapshot. If the snapshot changes, the DOI stops being reproducible.

Anything under papers/ carrying a DOI is a frozen artifact: never edited, never reformatted, never retrofitted to current repository standards — even when the current standard says otherwise.

This has been violated twice and both times had to be reverted:

• A repo-wide reference sweep rewrote links inside 113 files in DOI-bearing packages.
• A meta.yaml cleanup removed 62 files from inside published packages, because the rule it applied ("meta.yaml at experiment roots only") does not scope to papers at all.

Before any bulk operation, exclude papers/. After any bulk operation, verify:

# papers/ must be byte-identical to its last published state
git diff --stat main..HEAD -- papers/

Three consequences that look like inconsistencies

They all follow from the freeze rule. Do not "fix" them:

• series/PACSeries/v0.1 declares itself superseded by v0.2 and would otherwise belong in archive/ — it stays, because a reader following its DOI must find it here.
• Package meta.yaml files survived the repo-wide removal of 429 others.
• UNIFIED_EVIDENCE.md exists in 20 copies across 5 drifted versions. Reconciling them would mean editing published packages. The divergence is recorded in papers/README.md instead.

Corrections go forward, never backward

When published content is wrong, the correction goes into theory/corrections.md and the next version. Never into the frozen package. Superseded work is lineage: a result that was later reframed is only legible against what it replaced.

Two Zenodo record families — do not conflate them

Verified against the Zenodo API 2026-08-10:

	Concept DOI	Latest version
PACSeries — the papers	10.5281/zenodo.17295102	v0.3 = …21228036 (2026-07-06)
Repository archive — this repo as software	10.5281/zenodo.15595182	v1.0_prerelease = …15783623 (2025-07-01)

• Citing the papers → PACSeries concept DOI. This is what README.md advertises.
• Citing the repository → CITATION.cff, which carries the repo-archive concept DOI.

Always cite a concept DOI, never a version DOI. A concept DOI resolves forward to the newest version; CITATION.cff previously carried 15783623, a version DOI, which pinned every citation of the repository to a July 2025 snapshot.

CITATION.cff is not modified without verifying against Zenodo first.

registry/ is the source of truth

For publication status, DOIs and provenance, read papers/registry/ — not the per-package documents, which disagree with it in places.

status: needs_repackage means the source moved ahead of the uploaded artifact (v1.2 source vs v1.1/v2.1 packaged). Repackaging cuts a new DOI version, and production publishing is TTY-CLI only per ADR-0029 — it is not an agent action.