The Distributed Journal as Counter-Infrastructure is a call for papers by Lee Sharks. It presents journal publication as a metadata-coordination problem: independently deposited works may form a recognizable cluster when they share a journal name, author identifiers, keywords, and typed citations.
The proposed workflow is decentralized. An author writes an artifact, deposits it in an open repository, enters the journal name in metadata, cites at least two records in the cluster, adds discovery keywords, mints an identifier, and optionally cross-posts. The document calls the resulting state asynchronous acceptance: the work becomes part of the journal when retrieval systems successfully cluster it.
Four journals are named. Transactions of the Semantic Economy Institute concerns extraction and exhaustion of meaning. Grammata concerns operative philology, ancient texts, and heteronymic architecture. Provenance concerns forensic analysis of machine-generated representation. The Journal of Compression Studies concerns loss, survival, provenance, and measurement across compression layers.
The work rejects conventional pre-publication selection as its quality mechanism. In its place it proposes post-deposit evidence: citation, retrieval, clustering, and Encyclotron-style analysis. Weak records are expected to remain peripheral rather than being rejected before public existence.
The paper frames the distributed journal as counter-infrastructure to commercial publishing and argues that open, metadata-rich work has an advantage in machine-mediated discovery. These are the document’s April 2026 claims and operating assumptions. Later events—including the archive’s removal from Zenodo—make the record historically important, but should not be silently inserted into or used to rewrite the immutable call.
Referenced by 6 other entities in the archive. See the full Knowledge Graph for reference paths, or the primary record for the full deposit with reference details.