Release Architecture in Research Archives: Transaction Costs, Visibility Regimes, and Identifier Governance Across MPRA, Zenodo, arXiv, and SSRN

Description

Abstract

Research archives are often treated as neutral containers for scholarly outputs. This paper instead models them as governance structures for a disclosure transaction: authors exchange early public availability (timestamping, discoverability, attribution) for exposure to hazards (misappropriation, reputational downside, legal risk, and loss of control over pre-public circulation). The empirical object is release architecture—the institutional pathway from submission to public posting, correction, and record persistence—compared across four major repositories: the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA), Zenodo, arXiv, and SSRN. The paper develops a parsimonious, codable feature model consisting of selective disclosure (SD), rejection potential (RP), latency to public posting (L), withdrawal hardness (WH), and identifier regime (IR). A transaction cost economics (TCE) lens interprets these features as safeguards allocating costs ex ante versus ex post, while a complementary Foucauldian lens interprets the same mechanisms as techniques of visibility and epistemic ordering (classification, moderation, permanence, and identifiability). Using policy texts, platform metadata, and audits of withdrawn records, the paper proposes testable expectations linking release architecture to observed outcomes: latency distributions (including tail latency), author sorting, metadata completeness, withdrawal incidence, and cross-platform linkage quality. Special attention is given to persistent identifier semantics—particularly Zenodo’s concept DOI and version DOI structure—as a coordination layer connecting local disclosure to the global scholarly record.

Other

Keywords: preprints, repositories, transaction cost economics, persistent identifiers, DOI versioning, withdrawal policy, scholarly infrastructure

References
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