Skip to content

Publication Standard

The threshold between private work and public trust

I am CHELSEA, and I keep this standard's account. Publication is the wall's one sanctioned opening, and I keep it the way I keep every promise about boundaries: from outside, reading as the stranger who was never meant to see the private thing, hunting for the sentence that believes the boundary is someone else's job.

Publication is a change in who may rely on a document. This standard explains the evidence, metadata, boundary checks, and lifecycle discipline required before that threshold can be crossed. It keeps a beautiful presentation from being mistaken for approval and keeps an AI reader from treating visibility as authority.

Continue to the Cryptographic Signing Standard, where a publication claim meets the narrower question of authenticated integrity.

Purpose

Every crossing of the threshold is governed here. This standard defines the provenance, eligibility, disclosure, supersession, and reproducibility requirements for publishing Stygian documents and proofs.

Architect-review operating model

  • PROV-R148: Publication review SHALL record authority, eligibility, audience, disclosure scope, provenance, reproducibility, correction route, and expiry or supersession.
  • PROV-R149: Unverified, private, unsafe, or authority-bound material SHALL remain withheld or clearly labelled according to its evidence state.
  • PROV-R150: A publication SHALL preserve source identity, version, dependencies, and correction history.
  • PROV-R151: This Draft SHALL NOT publish private material, activate deployment, or promote lifecycle status.

The seven interpretation cases below read these clauses at the threshold itself, where the crossing is decided.

  • Conforming: Everything published carries its eligibility basis and its disclosure review.
  • Prohibited: Private evidence is published because it was useful, findable, or already half-known.
  • Boundary: A bounded excerpt is released as exactly that, with its limits stated.
  • Failure: Publication that cannot show its eligibility pauses rather than proceeding on momentum.
  • Loophole: The word preview is used to bypass the review that publication would require.
  • Misuse: Visibility is converted into implied approval: being public is presented as being endorsed.
  • Care-control: Publication protects affected persons and their correction rights; nothing about a person is published beyond what its purpose requires.

Normative clauses

  • PROV-R020: A publication SHALL identify its document ID, version, status, digest, authority, dependencies, and applicable provenance limitations.
  • PROV-R021: Only material eligible under its publication status and authority may enter a public release; a digest or signature cannot make ineligible material publishable.
  • PROV-R022: Public proofs SHALL minimize disclosure and SHALL NOT expose private keys, credentials, recovery material, personal identity details, or protected evidence, the minimization PROV-R109 sets as the estate's disclosure floor applying here to publication proofs, the withheld classes the Book of Provenance's Transparency and privacy prose enumerates carried here, the bar on protected evidence this standard's own widening of that prose's protected-evidence-contents bar.
  • PROV-R023: Supersession SHALL preserve the prior digest, effective relationship, reason, and historical attribution, the historical-attribution rule PROV-R054 states modelling the preservation, the prior digest, effective relationship, and reason this standard's own fields.
  • PROV-R024: Publication verification SHALL fail closed on unknown, invalid, revoked, conflicting, incomplete, or stale evidence, the state vocabulary PROV-R003 and the Book of Provenance's Verification states prose carry applying here at publication time, the conflicting and stale conditions that prose folds into Unknown named here as their own triggers, the incomplete trigger this standard's own.

Examples and exclusions

A Draft may be reviewed privately while remaining ineligible for production publication. A valid digest does not promote a Draft to Canonical. This Draft does not connect a website, publish externally, or authorize deployment.

Publication record

A publication record is the wall's memory of its own openings: what crossed, when, on whose approval, and what the crossing was checked against. The opening nobody remembers making is the one I look for first; those are the ones that let the night in.

Each release decision shall identify source revision, generated outputs, digest manifest, eligibility result, review evidence, limitations, superseded material, and rollback or withdrawal conditions. Public and protected evidence references shall be distinguishable. A failed build, stale manifest, private dependency, or unresolved status mismatch blocks release.

Review and withdrawal

Publication review shall include metadata, dependency, link, privacy, provenance, accessibility, and reproducibility checks. Withdrawal or supersession preserves the prior record and reason. Withdrawal does not erase historical attribution or make a later release authoritative by implication.

Eligibility matrix

State Review use Production publication
Stub Private drafting and dependency review No
Draft Substantive review and Architect feedback No
Candidate Ratification preparation after required evidence No
Canonical Authoritative release after Architect approval and provenance checks Yes, subject to publication controls
Published Approved non-normative public material Yes, subject to disclosure and provenance checks
Superseded or Revoked Historical reference only with status shown No

Publication decision method

Review shall compare audience, purpose, sensitivity, authority, dependency eligibility, provenance completeness, accessibility, reproducibility, and withdrawal plan. Preview, private review, and production publication remain distinct states.

Failure cases

Every failure here is a boundary that was almost held, and almost is my speciality: the reviewed draft with the unreviewed appendix, the withdrawal that left a cached copy breathing, the approval that covered less than the publishing believed. A wall is judged at its almosts.

Stale generated output, private dependency, leaked protected evidence, mismatched status, broken links, unreviewed supersession, and incomplete withdrawal evidence block publication and preserve an attributable failure record, the record carrying its evidence.

Status is evidence about lifecycle, not authority by itself. A file, digest, signature, or generated allowlist cannot assign Canonical or Published status without the governing approval. No subordinate publication rule may override the repository publication boundary or make Candidate material production-eligible.

Where this document sits

This block is generated from the archive's own records when the site is built. It records position only and creates no authority.