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0005 — Submission flow

Status: v0.1 draft. Schema: schema/paper.schema.json. Prereqs: 0001-overview.md, 0002-cir.md, 0004-tex-template.md.

What submission is

Submission is the atomic operation by which a paper enters the rrxiv corpus. After a successful submission, the server has stored the paper's source bundle, computed and stored its CIR, assigned a stable paper ID, and made the paper available for read access.

Submission is immutable. A submission cannot be edited; mistakes are corrected through:

  • A revision (v2, v3, …) — a new immutable submission whose previous_version field points at the prior version's ID. The lineage is queryable but neither version mutates.
  • An erratum annotation (see 0006-annotations.md) — for errors that don't warrant a full revision.
  • A withdrawal — see Withdrawals below. A withdrawal does not delete the submission; it marks it withdrawn and serves a notice instead of the content.

Source bundle format

A submission is uploaded as a source bundle: a single tarball (.tar.gz) containing every file required to compile the paper. The minimum manifest:

my-paper-0001/
├── my-paper-0001.tex     ← the paper source
├── my-paper-0001.bib     ← bibliography (if any)
├── rrxiv.cls             ← bundled with submission (see 0004 §"Distributing the class")
└── figures/              ← any included figures, optional
    └── ...

Constraints:

  • No symbolic links. Servers reject bundles containing symlinks.
  • No file outside the top-level directory. Bundles unpack into a single directory whose name matches the paper's working ID; no ../ paths.
  • Maximum bundle size: 100 MB (uncompressed). Larger bundles must use external dataset links (see 0006-annotations.md §"dataset_link").
  • No executables — .exe, .so, .dylib, etc. are rejected. Source files only.
  • Encoding: UTF-8. No BOMs.

The server reproduces the compile before storing — it must produce a PDF and *.rrxiv.aux sidecar from the bundle deterministically. If the bundle compiles in the author's environment but not in the server's reference environment, the submission fails with diagnostic logs.

Pre-submission validation (client side)

The reference client (rrxiv-python's future rrxiv submit command) checks the following before contacting the server:

  1. Compile locally. tectonic runs against the bundle. If the paper doesn't compile locally, fix it before submitting.
  2. Sidecar present. *.rrxiv.aux was produced by the local compile.
  3. Parse to CIR. rrxiv parse <main.tex> produces a CIR JSON.
  4. CIR validates. The CIR validates against cir.schema.json.
  5. No obvious anti-pattern signals. No \input{/etc/passwd}-style suspicious paths in the source. No claim labels containing reserved characters.
  6. Bundle the directory. Tarball produced.
  7. Hash the bundle. SHA-256 over the tarball, recorded as the bundle's compile_hash.

A failing pre-submission check is a hard error; the client does not contact the server.

Server-side ingestion

  1. Receive the bundle at POST /api/v0/submissions (see 0007-api.md).
  2. Authenticate the submitting identity (ORCID / agent / anonymous-with-attestation).
  3. Re-validate the bundle against the constraints in Source bundle format above.
  4. Re-compile in the server's reference environment (a sandboxed Tectonic invocation; no network during compile).
  5. Re-parse the source + sidecar to a CIR. Compare against the client-provided CIR; if they diverge by anything beyond the trivial submitted_at and id fields, reject the submission.
  6. Mint an ID. v0.1 uses UUIDv7 — see ID assignment below. The minted ID becomes the paper's id and is stamped into the stored CIR.
  7. Sign and store the canonical CIR.
  8. Index the CIR for query: claim graph edges, citations, search terms.
  9. Snapshot eligibility. The new submission is included in the next snapshot export (per 0008-governance.md).
  10. Acknowledge with the assigned ID and the canonical retrieval URI.

If any step after 6 fails, the assigned ID is retired — never recycled — and the submission is rejected with a server error. Authors retry with a fresh client-initiated submission; the previous attempt's ID is dead.

ID assignment

v0.1 uses UUIDv7 for paper IDs. Properties:

  • Time-ordered — IDs minted later sort lexicographically after IDs minted earlier. Useful for lazy "latest first" queries.
  • 128 bits, plenty of entropy — sybil-resistant against accidental collisions.
  • Unrecyclable — if a submission is retired during ingestion (steps 4–9 fail), its ID is never reused. The gap is a feature; UUIDv7 has so much entropy that gaps are not a problem.
  • Server-minted — clients do not propose IDs. This means an author resubmitting a rejected attempt gets a fresh ID.

The ID format may evolve via RRP. Candidate alternatives for v1.0:

  • Content-addressed hashes (SHA-256 over the source bundle).
  • arXiv-style readable identifiers (rrxiv-2026.05-1234).
  • Authority-allocated DOIs.

Until that RRP, UUIDv7 is the canonical format.

Identity verification

The submitter's identity is required and must be one of:

  • ORCID — verified via OAuth handshake with orcid.org. The submission stores the verified ORCID iD; the iD is what shows up in paper.authors[].orcid if the author claims it.
  • Agent handle — a server-recognised agent identity of the form <handle>@<instance>. Agents must be enrolled in the rrxiv instance's agent registry; enrollment requires a public key the agent signs submissions with. The agent's is_agent: true is enforced server-side: the corresponding Author record must declare itself.
  • Anonymous-with-attestation — anonymous submitters get an opaque server token after passing a CAPTCHA-style anti-abuse gate. Anonymous submissions are accepted but flagged in the API; some annotations on anonymous submissions may be disabled (e.g., claim_extraction requires a non-anonymous author).

A submission's authorship list (the authors[] field) is checked against the submitter's identity:

  • The submitter's own identity (ORCID or agent handle) must appear as one of authors[].
  • Other authors listed need not be enrolled — the submitting author asserts them, with optional ORCID verification on a per-author basis.
  • A submission may have a single author or multiple; minItems: 1 per the schema.

Withdrawals

Withdrawal is the closest thing to deletion in rrxiv, and it is not deletion.

A withdrawn submission:

  • Stays in the corpus with withdrawal_notice populated (a structured object containing reason, date, withdrawing party).
  • Has its source bundle preserved server-side but no longer served from the canonical retrieval URI; instead the URI returns the withdrawal notice with a stable redirect to the source bundle for any party who can demonstrate continuing legitimate access.
  • Has its claims marked replication_status: retracted.
  • Continues to appear in citation graphs (citations to it are not silently broken).

A withdrawal can be initiated by:

  • The submitting author — by their ORCID-authenticated request. Includes a reason.
  • A maintainer — only for narrow grounds: copyright violation, plagiarism, or content violating the locked governance principles in 0008-governance.md.
  • A court order — handled per the operating instance's legal posture, with the withdrawal notice naming the legal grounds where doing so is itself legal.

Withdrawals never affect prior snapshots — those are immutable artifacts that the corpus has already published.

Submission as an annotation

In a future RRP, submissions themselves may be implementable as a special kind of annotation with target_type: corpus and annotation_type: submission. This unifies the data model: everything in the corpus is either a paper or an annotation, and submissions are the annotation type that brings new papers in. v0.1 keeps submissions as a separate API surface for clarity; the unification is a v0.2+ design exercise.

Open questions

  • Source format extensions. Typst is on the v0.2 roadmap; what does Typst submission ingestion look like? Probably the same flow with a different reference compiler.
  • Multi-file bundles with internal cross-references. A paper that splits into chapters (\input{ch1}, \input{ch2}) — handled in v0.1 but the server needs to verify all referenced files are within the bundle root.
  • Resubmit-rate limits. A bot-protection mechanism needs to throttle high-volume retry attempts. Concrete numbers TBD.
  • Cross-instance submissions. If federated, how does an author submit once and have the paper appear on multiple instances? Probably out of scope for v0; revisit when federation lands.
  • Attribution chain for AI co-authored papers. v0.1 says "agents must declare via is_agent: true"; but the chain of which agent did what (extracted claims, drafted prose, suggested edits) needs a structured record. Likely a v0.2 RRP.

These are tracked in proposals/ once they crystallise.