material-passport

name	material-passport
description	Use before formal research writing or delivery to package source readiness, compliance or requirement evidence, citation boundaries, and unresolved confirmations for the artifact being moved forward.

Material Passport

Use this skill when a formal research artifact is about to move from planning to drafting, drafting to review, or review to delivery.

Purpose

Create a compact evidence passport for the artifact so the agent does not treat a polished draft as ready when sources, requirements, compliance, citations, or open confirmations are still weak.

Activate For

• proposal, manuscript, thesis/dissertation section, report, grant, protocol, or reviewer/stakeholder-facing draft
• formal Word/PDF delivery
• citation-heavy or requirement-sensitive writing
• ethics, privacy, IRB, client, funder, journal, or institutional requirement claims
• any task entering research-wiki/DOCUMENT_PIPELINE.md

Workflow

1. Identify the artifact, audience, purpose, and output status.
2. Choose passport scope:
   • short: internal planning or early draft movement; missing optional evidence becomes WARN.
   • full: reviewer-facing, stakeholder-facing, submission-facing, or final delivery; missing required evidence becomes HOLD.
3. Check the strongest available local evidence:
   • source-readiness record;
   • compliance or requirement tracker;
   • citation or claim-support report when citation-heavy;
   • runtime receipt, source map, and integrity preflight for full-scope delivery.
4. List unresolved TO CONFIRM items.
5. State the boundary clearly: the passport packages readiness evidence; it does not prove claim support, approval, acceptance, or official compliance.

Local Tool

python3 scripts/material_passport.py --artifact <path> --scope short
python3 scripts/material_passport.py --artifact <path> --scope full --audience reviewer-facing

Add flags when relevant:

--requires-compliance
--requires-requirements
--citation-heavy
--citation-report <path>
--runtime-receipt <path>
--source-map <path>
--integrity-report <path>
--quality-gate <path>
--to-confirm "field or decision still unresolved"

Failure Behaviour

• PASS: required evidence is present for the selected scope.
• WARN: short-scope passport has missing or non-blocking evidence.
• HOLD: full-scope or required evidence is missing.

If status is HOLD, do not call the artifact ready, client-ready, submission-ready, or publication-ready. Resolve the missing evidence, reduce the claim, or keep the artifact as a working draft.

Boundaries

• A passport does not prove that cited sources support claims.
• A passport does not upgrade metadata-only sources.
• A passport does not replace compliance, ethics/IRB, journal, funder, client, supervisor, peer-review, or institutional approval.
• Retrieval tools, Obsidian, Zotero, and external metadata searches remain support tools, not evidence authorities.