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  • Status: accepted · Date: 2026-07-18 · Deciders: Davor Runje

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Context

honest-scholar should become widely used. The mission-aligned growth vector is the honesty mission itself: research venues increasingly require an AI-use disclosure, and a truthful, structured disclosure that names the protocol followed both helps the author and points other researchers to the tool. This is the publication-level analog of the commit-attribution trailer (resources/commit-attribution.md).

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Decision drivers

  • Growth that serves users, not spam — a disclosure they’d want anyway.
  • Must be honest: the tool cannot certify honesty; a hollow “seal” would be hypocritical for an integrity tool (anti-Goodhart).
  • Must be automatic at the right moment — a passive doc won’t spread; the author shouldn’t have to remember it.
  • Must respect agency: proposed, author-owned, opt-in — never auto-inserted.

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Considered options

  1. Ship a truthful, provenance-backed AI-use disclosure + citation, and have paper-synthesis proactively PROPOSE them at finalize (opt-in, author-owned).
  2. Passive docs only (a template in the repo, no workflow step).
  3. Auto-insert a disclosure/citation into the paper.
  4. A “certified honest” badge/seal.

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Decision

Option 1. Add DISCLOSURE.md (disclosure template + how-to-cite + optional badge) and CITATION.cff. paper-synthesis, after the publish decision is signed off, proactively proposes an AI-use disclosure generated from the actual provenance/sign-off record plus the citation — for the author to review, edit, adopt, or decline. Citation is the GitHub repo now, transitioning to an arXiv preprint then a published paper.

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Consequences

  • A discovery vector aligned with the mission; every published paper that carries the disclosure exposes honest-scholar to researchers and reviewers.
  • The disclosure is evidence-based (from the record), so it is honest and not a hollow sticker.
  • paper-synthesis gains a finalize-time proposal step; DISCLOSURE.md + CITATION.cff are maintained.

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Rejected alternatives

  • Passive docs only — won’t spread (no automatic step); the author forgets it.
  • Auto-insert — violates agency; the author must author and own the statement.
  • “Certified honest” badge — the tool can’t certify honesty; a hollow seal is Goodhart-bait and hypocritical for an integrity tool.
DISCLOSURE.md; CITATION.cff; skills/paper-synthesis/SKILL.md (the proposal step); resources/commit-attribution.md (the git-level analog); agency + anti-Goodhart principles (meta-spec §2.1, §3.6).