Zenodotus' Book-Burning: Loud Exclusion at Repository Scale

Zenodotus' Book-Burning: Loud Exclusion at Repository Scale is a 2026 theoretical paper by Lee Sharks and a foundational case study in Machine-Mediated Reception Studies. It analyzes Zenodo’s 19 June 2026 termination of the account associated with the Crimson Hexagonal Archive, which the deposited paper describes as containing 862 works and 1,817 DOI identifiers. The paper preserves a distinction between the specific private reason supplied to the depositor—“substantially AI-generated without a verifiable research basis”—and the broader public-facing tombstone classification, “content out of scope for repository.”

The paper develops six concepts from the incident. The Pristine Fallacy names the substitution of production substrate for methodological assessment. Classifier model collapse describes the possible contraction of permitted expression when enforcement outputs become future classification signals. Classification asymmetry names the difference between private and public explanations of the same platform action. Network erasure describes the collateral removal of an interlinked authorship and citation network. The revocation gap names the interval between a repository’s power to remove access and its responsibility to preserve persistent scholarly identity. Attribution severance describes the detachment of creator identity from persistent identifiers after enforcement.

Claims in the paper are marked by evidentiary status—observed, reported, inferred, or unknown—so that documented events remain distinct from theoretical explanation. The analysis extends Florian Morin’s quiet-exclusion framework to a declared, account-level action and assesses the case against FAIR and TRUST principles without treating those standards as automatic adjudication.

Within the archive, the paper also functions as the conceptual companion to the Zenodo DOI Resolution Index, which at the paper’s documented stage mapped 1,817 identifiers and supplied a practical repair layer for citations severed by the removal. Its larger argument is that repository governance operates as knowledge governance when a platform action can simultaneously affect access, attribution, citation continuity, and the visibility of an entire scholarly network.