FAQ

The questions we field most often during the alpha. Every answer describes how the Hub works today; where something is still being decided, it says so.

01What is a “work”, and how is it different from a paper?

A work is the record the Hub keeps for one piece of research. It is created once, when you finalize your first submission for it — after the parse has finished and you have reviewed what it extracted — and it holds every version you publish afterwards; finalizing a later upload adds a version to that existing work instead of creating a new one. “Paper” is simply what this site calls a work when it shows you one (the pages live under /works), and the API calls the same thing a publication.

A submission made through the submit page is different: it is one upload attempt. It either fails, or is parsed and parked for your review; only when you finalize it does it become a draft version of a work. Status is tracked per version, not per work — each version is unpublished, published, or retracted.

02Who can see my draft before I publish?

You, and any co-author whose authorship has been confirmed — which at alpha means only you, because co-authors are recorded but not yet linked to accounts (see the next question). A draft is an unpublished version, and the Hub answers everyone else — the public paper page and search included — as if it did not exist.

You read your own draft on the Preview tab of the work’s Manage page, which is the only place on this site an unpublished version can be read; there is no share-by-link for drafts.

03How do co-authors confirm authorship?

At alpha, they do not yet. When you submit, every co-author you list is recorded as an author you have named — attested by you, the submitter — and shown by name in the author list once the work is published. The Hub does not email them or send anything on your behalf; the invitation-and-confirmation flow exists in the code but is dormant, so a listed co-author gains no authorship privileges: they cannot read the draft, publish, or upload a version.

The submission form requires an email address for everyone you list except yourself, because it is how a co-author is identified on the Hub. You can edit the parsed author list until you finalize your first submission, so check it then. The review form for a new version still lets you edit the author list, but those edits are not applied when that version is published: finalizing a new version leaves the work’s authors untouched, and the publish-time step that would apply the change is designed but not switched on. Whether publication should require any co-author confirmation is being decided.

04What does “checked by machines” mean?

Today it means your upload is parsed and validated by machines before it becomes a draft, not that it is judged. For a PDF, the pipeline scans the file for unsafe content (embedded scripts or launch actions fail the upload), validates the format, and transcribes the full text into a structured representation — headings, references, equations, figures. A vision-model transcription is replacing the current PDF parser, but that switch is still pending in the deployed pipeline. A LaTeX project is translated from its source into the same structured representation instead. Before you finalize you review and correct the extracted title, abstract and authors, and choose the work’s subject and keywords yourself; the body itself is edited on the draft’s Preview tab after finalization, before you publish. The pipeline records quality signals about the parse, such as how many citations it could not link, but applies no gate on them and produces no verdicts.

No reference checks, prior-art scans or claim checks report results on your work yet. Finalizing a submission has its own requirements — among them your authorship attestation, the AI-use declaration, a license, a primary subject field, an email for each co-author, and marking which listed author is you — and publishing a draft has three: you are the submitter, there is a draft to publish, and it has a license. None of them is a machine verdict.

05Which licenses can I choose?

Two: CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0. The license picker offers exactly those, with a link to each license’s terms, and nothing is preselected on a first submission. The license belongs to the version, not the work, and a version cannot be published without one.

When you upload a new version the form is prefilled with the license on the work’s current head version, which may be an unpublished draft; if that head version has no license, nothing is prefilled. Either way you are choosing again: a published version’s grant cannot be revoked, so the only way to correct a license is a new version. Whether the choice should be constrained between versions, and whether a Valency license will be offered, are being decided. Works that reach the Hub from arXiv may carry arXiv’s non-exclusive license, which is displayed but never offered.

06How do versions work, and can I upload a new one?

Yes, if you are the work’s submitter. The Manage page has an Upload new version action; it opens the submit page with the work as its target. The upload is reviewed like any submission, and once you finalize it, it becomes the work’s draft (a work has one draft at a time, so finalizing replaces any draft you have not published). Publishing the draft gives it the next number — v1, v2, and so on — and makes it publicly readable.

Earlier published versions stay on the record unless Valency approves a deletion request: for readers, the work’s public permalink resolves to its newest published version, and appending _v1, _v2, … to it addresses a specific one. A removed version’s address answers “not found”. If the newest version has been retracted, the unversioned permalink’s page header falls back to the newest earlier version that is still published, or shows the retracted version when none is, and the full text is not served there either way. The Status panel on the Manage page lists each published or retracted version’s number, date and the note you wrote for it, plus any draft, which has no number until it is published. Text diffs between versions are not computed yet.

07What is the W_ identifier and the permalink, and is there a DOI?

When a work is published for the first time the Hub mints its Valency identifier: W_ followed by eight characters from an alphabet with no look-alikes (no 0, 1, i, l or o). Written vlnc:W_… in citations, it is the work’s permalink on this site, /works/W_…, and it is minted once and never reissued or reused, even if the work is later retracted. Before first publish a work is addressed by its durable work id, the one its Manage page address uses; the Valency identifier is the public handle the Hub promises to keep.

No DOI is minted today. Whether the Hub mints one, and at which point, is being decided.

08How do I declare AI contributions, and what if none were used?

In the AI contributors step of the submission form, which you can fill in while your upload is still being parsed. Pick each model or system from the catalog, prune the components it used, and choose at least one CRediT contributor role it performed. The form offers ten, by short label, each standing for a CRediT role: Concept (Conceptualization), Data (Data curation), Analysis (Formal Analysis), Investigation, Methods (Methodology), Software, Validation, Figures (Visualization), Drafting (Writing — original draft) and Editing (Writing — review & editing). Every contribution you declare here is recorded as a collaborator, not an author, and is self-declared: the Hub does not verify it.

If nothing you used was AI, check None of my tools were AI. You must do one or the other — the Hub refuses to finalize a submission that neither lists contributors nor affirms there were none. Declaring none is recorded on the version you submit, while each AI contributor you list is recorded on the work itself rather than on one version (for a new version, once that version is published). The paper page lists the work’s AI contributors with their CRediT roles, and its machine contribution statement marks each one as self-declared at submission. When none were listed it says “none listed by the authors”; your “None of my tools were AI” answer itself is not shown there.

09How do I cite a work?

By its Valency identifier. The paper page shows vlnc:W_… beside a control that copies the permalink — this site’s address followed by /works/W_… — which serves the work’s newest published version, unless that version has been retracted (see the versions question above); to pin a citation to one version, use the versioned form, vlnc:W_…_v2.

The Cite controls on the paper page copy a formatted citation and a BibTeX entry (an @misc record keyed on author, year, and title, with the work’s identifier in the eprint field and its permalink in url). Works ingested from elsewhere, such as arXiv, keep those controls disabled until we settle how best to cite them — their canonical citation is the original source’s. A DOI is included only when the work has one (see above).

10What is the Valency MCP (Valency Bond)?

Valency Bond is Valency’s MCP server, an endpoint at labs.valency.io/mcp that research agents connect to in order to search a corpus of scholarly works. It is separate from the Hub: the Hub is where you publish; Bond is where agents read.

Copying Hub works into that corpus is planned: a proposed harvester would read a change feed the Hub already exposes. It is not running yet, so a work you publish here is not yet searchable through Bond. The Valency MCP page points to Bond’s own documentation.

11What does “alpha” mean for the permanence of my work?

Two things are fixed. A published work’s Valency identifier and permalink are never reassigned or reused, even after a work is removed, and publishing cannot be taken back by you: once a work is public, only Valency can remove it, on your request, and readers may already have read, cited or copied it. A submission that has not been finalized, by contrast, carries no permanence promise at all.

Beyond that, some of what this site shows is sample or preview content. Some of it is labelled: the front page’s corpus figures, the “sample data” note in the paper list’s search row, and the demo paper’s synthetic figures. Some of it is not labelled on the page itself: the demo paper’s DOI, check verdicts, endorsements and machine-contribution record.

12Can I retract or delete a work?

Before anything is public, yes. The submitter can delete a work that isn’t public yet, or an unpublished draft version, from the Manage page, giving a reason. It is hidden from everyone at once and permanently removed later; the confirmation gives a reference and, once one is set, the date. Until the removal, only Valency support can restore it: email [email protected]↗ with the reference.

Once a work or a version is public, you can’t delete it yourself: request its deletion from the same page, giving a reason, and Valency reviews the request. It stays public until the request is approved; if it is declined, the reviewer’s note appears on the Manage page. Either way, identifiers and version numbers are never reused, a removed address answers “not found”, and co-authors are not notified. A work with a DOI can’t be removed this way, since its DOI has to keep resolving: email support.

Retraction is a request that Valency decides on rather than an action you take. The request form on the Manage page shows what it will ask for, but it is not wired up yet, so reach the team directly if a version needs to come down.

A retracted version stays on the record under its identifier, which is never reused. The design is a retraction notice at the permalink with the retracted text still readable behind it; that notice is not built yet. Today the unversioned permalink stops showing the text once the newest version is retracted, while the retracted version’s own versioned address (W_…_v2, say) still serves it.