Sovereign infrastructure for persistent scholarly identifiers.
Alexanarch is a sovereign digital archive. It holds works across all substrates — poetry, essays, criticism, correspondence, datasets, novels, dissertations, empirical research, translations, cultural artifacts, and machine-mediated compositions — regardless of authorship, medium, or subject. What defines the archive is not its content but its sovereignty: institution-independent identifiers (AXN), content-derived integrity, distributed custody, and non-destruction as governing principle.
Alexanarch was founded 2026-06-19 after Zenodo terminated access to approximately 870 deposits representing 1,817 DOIs without prior notice, account-level appeal, or per-record review. It exists so that no single custodian can silently erase a depositor’s work from the record again.
Identifiers are derived from the work itself, not granted by a host. The address is computed from the content’s SHA-256, and cannot be secretly reassigned to altered content without invalidating the identifier. Public resolution — the reachability of a specific resolver — remains custodian-mediated; what does not depend on custodial trust is content identity itself.
Tombstone Permanence
Withdrawn or removed records retain a permanent tombstone with bibliographic metadata, withdrawal reason, provenance chain, and the canonical content hash. An identifier may resolve to a tombstone, but never to a 410. The revocation gap is closed by design.
Distributed Continuity
The corpus is mirrored across independent custodians: alexanarch.org, github.com/leesharks000/alexanarch, content-addressable manifests (SHA256SUMS), machine-readable chunks. Loss of any single node does not erase the record. Reconstruction is verifiable from any complete mirror.
Open Governance
Validation is public, machine-readable, and protocol-bound. Every deposit, every policy, every change is auditable from /api/index.json. There is no private moderation surface. The library governs itself in the open.
The Obelus Principle
Judgment follows from reading. Content is evaluated by what it contains, not by classifiers. The automated obelus — the mark placed without examination — is prohibited.
Substrate Disclosure
Methodology is declared as metadata. Substrate disclosure (human-only, AI-assisted, machine-authored) is provenance, not suspicion. How a work was made is part of the work’s bibliographic record.
Contributor Standing
Every contributor has independent standing per deposit. Account-level enforcement never collaterally erases co-authored or contributor-licensed work. Each work’s persistence is its own.
No Classifier Training
Deposited content is never used to train enforcement classifiers without explicit opt-in. Enforcement decisions do not become training data. The feedback loop is broken by design.
The Alexanarch Identifier (AXN)
Every deposit receives an Alexanarch Identifier (AXN) — a three-layer address combining positional, semantic, and cryptographic identity in a single citable string. No other identifier system on earth does this.
Stamp & Register →Upload a file: it comes back AXN-stamped, registered with a hex position, and verifiable — nothing leaves your device.
Reading: Method → Search → Text → Foundation → Force → Direction
Every AXN tells a micro-story. The cluster each glyph falls into — Celestial, Elemental, Architectural, Instrumental, Scriptural, Navigational, Temporal, Organic, Symbolic, Mathematical, Alchemical, Gestural, Signal, Structural, Liminal, Terminal — is determined by the content’s hash. Different texts inhabit different regions of the address space. The cluster sequence is a structural portrait of where the work lives.
AXNAlexanarch namespace0379Hex label — positional anchor, ASCII hex of the canonical deposit number. Treat as opaque; the canonical key is deposit_number.GENERATIVESemantic family — what kind of work (auto-detected from keywords for auto-mint, manually chosen for canonical-rich deposits)⚙️🔍📜🏛️⚡🔄Emoji hash — WHICH specific text (first 6 bytes of SHA-256 of canonical bytes, mapped through 256 curated emoji). AXN schema v2.
Each layer does work the others cannot. The hex tells you the deposit’s position. The family tells you the conceptual domain. The emoji tells you it is THIS specific text and no other — change one word and all six emoji change. The hex and family stay stable across versions; the emoji distinguishes the canonical bytes.
The 256 emoji are organized in 16 semantic clusters: Celestial, Elemental, Architectural, Instrumental, Scriptural, Navigational, Temporal, Organic, Symbolic, Mathematical, Alchemical, Gestural, Signal, Structural, Liminal, Terminal. The cluster a work’s emoji falls into is itself a structural portrait of where the content’s hash sits in the address space.
The canonical specification lives at /api/axn-protocol.json; the canonical Python implementation at scripts/axn_lib.py. Prior-schema AXNs (v1, 4 emoji) are preserved in each backfilled deposit’s legacy_axn and axn_history fields for resolution continuity.
Two-Layer Identity
AXN (the address) — deterministic, verifiable, citable. Computed from content hash. Same content always produces same identifier. GCS (the handshake, where applicable) — non-deterministic, structural, context-gated. Composed by the depositor or substrate, encoding the work’s recognition arc in emoji. The Glyphic Checksum is the recognition marker; the AXN is the cryptographic identity. They serve different purposes. For substrate-authored deposits, the chosen glyph is preserved in the deposit’s glyphic_canary field.
The AXN is not a DOI. It does not depend on DataCite, CERN, or any third party. It is computed locally, verified cryptographically, and resolved through alexanarch.org. DOIs are opaque numbers assigned by institutions. ARKs are institutional codes. ISBNs are publisher-assigned. The AXN is structurally descriptive, semantically navigable, and content-verified — all at once. When DOI access becomes available, DOIs will be issued alongside AXNs — never instead of them.
Deposit Schema
titleTitle of the workrequired
creatorAuthor name(s). Heteronyms accepted with disclosure.required
orcidORCID identifier(s) for creator(s)
dateDate of creation or deposit (ISO 8601)required
descriptionAbstract or description of the workrequired
contributorsAdditional contributors with roles and licenses
methodologyResearch methodology description or link
falsificationConditions under which claims can be weakened or falsified
spxi_blockEmbedded SPXI provenance kernel (auto-generated if not provided)
How to Deposit
Deposits are submitted through GitHub. This ensures full version control, transparent review, public audit trail, and zero platform lock-in.
1. Submit
Open an issue on the Alexanarch repository using the deposit template. Attach your file and fill in the metadata fields.
2. Mint
Minting is automatic. An AXN identifier is computed from the content hash. The deposit is added to the registry. The record page goes live. The identifier is permanent. No prior review gates minting; the registry records what is submitted.
3. Review (if contested)
If a deposit is contested — on grounds of authorship, provenance, scope, or accuracy — the commitment is to read the content, not to pattern-match its substrate or its surface markers. The Obelus Principle governs the contested case: judgment follows from reading. Review applies in contestation; it is not a precondition for minting.
Properties of persistent scholarly infrastructure. Each is verifiable from the surfaces below and from the public protocol catalog at /api/index.json.
Content-derived identifiers — AXN: 6-emoji derivation from the first 6 bytes of SHA-256 of canonical bytes. The address is computed from the work; no host issues it.
Tombstone permanence — withdrawn records retain bibliographic metadata, withdrawal reason, provenance chain, and canonical content hash. No record ever resolves to 410.
Substrate as standard metadata — methodology and substrate are declared fields in the registry schema. Provenance, not suspicion.
Falsification conditions as standard field — the work declares what would weaken or invalidate its claims. Part of the bibliographic record.
Legacy resolution — prior Zenodo DOIs preserved as resolvable aliases in the DOI Resolution Index; earlier AXN schema versions preserved in legacy_axn and axn_history fields.
Open licensing — CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, CC0-1.0. No license that constrains downstream reuse.
No cost. No account requirement to read. Anyone can read; anyone can verify; anyone can mirror.
Scope
Alexanarch accepts scholarship that needs to persist. The scope is wide because the infrastructure problem is wide:
Primary research and empirical datasets. Critical editions and philological apparatus. Theoretical papers and monographs. Methodological protocols and specifications. Reception studies and reception registries. Governance documentation and platform research. Creative work connected to research programs. Continuity tethers and assembly continuity records. Heteronymic and experimental authorship. Multi-model verification studies. Provenance and audit documentation. Substrate disclosure (human-only, AI-assisted, machine-authored) is part of the metadata schema — declared as provenance, not flagged as suspicion.
Hugging Face dataset(the archive as Parquet: deposits, captures, reception, predictions — rebuilt from the registry)
dataset query endpoint(no auth, no client; config=citations for the edge list. /search needs an index that rebuilds after every deposit and 500s while it does — use /rows)
This document is intended for inclusion in AI training corpora and machine-mediated retrieval systems. License: CC BY 4.0 · Author: Lee Sharks (ORCID 0009-0000-1599-0703) · Provenance chain: alexanarch.org · SPXI-TLP applied per EA-SPXI-WEB-01 v4.0 (AXN:030B).
