Submission, revision, and withdrawal policy 0.1

This is the user-facing governance policy for the Circuit Bench 0.1 development prototype.

New submissions

• Decoder versions, circuit revisions, and results enter pending_review, even when an administrator submits them.
• Machines publish immediately after validation. Their automatic approval is attributed to **System**, not to the uploader.
• Custom tags are available provisionally after a System approval; administrators separately decide whether they become official terms.
• Community noise models, benchmark revisions, and benchmark attempts require administrator approval. Official noise-model or benchmark status is a separate curation decision.
• Results can be submitted only when their decoder version, circuit revision, evaluator release, and machine are already published.

Editing and revisions

• A pending_review or pending_reapproval candidate can be edited in place. Its exact candidate UUID is retained and the edit is recorded in its moderation history.
• A published record is immutable. “Edit / new revision” creates a separate successor candidate. For decoder and circuit revisions, the uploader explicitly chooses either to leave the predecessor published alongside the candidate or to withdraw it while submitting the successor for reapproval. Neither choice changes the predecessor’s scientific content.
• A withdrawn record is also immutable. “Revise and resubmit” creates a separate successor in pending_reapproval.
• A successor to a withdrawn machine requires human reapproval even though an ordinary new machine publishes automatically.
• For decoder, circuit, result, and machine candidates, an administrator may request changes with a review note or reject the candidate. The uploader may edit and resubmit a changes-requested candidate.

Withdrawal

The uploader or an administrator can withdraw a published record after confirming the action and giving a reason. Withdrawal does not delete or rewrite the exact record: its permanent page, timestamps, lineage, and moderation history remain available, marked as withdrawn.

Approval attribution

Every publication made through this workflow records who approved it. Manual review records the administrator’s account. Policy-driven publication records **System**. Older development fixtures for which no approval event exists are labelled “Not recorded (legacy)” rather than receiving a guessed attribution.

Credits and result authorship

A signed-in user may claim a public name-only credit. The exact record uploader or an administrator reviews that claim. Decoder-author status on a result is derived by the server from exact-version credits and explicit approvals; it cannot be supplied in a result form.

Files

Files attached only to an unpublished candidate are private to the uploader and administrators. They become public when a published or withdrawn exact record refers to them. Uploading identical bytes does not grant access to another account’s private submission.

Administration

The admin page is a work queue, not a catalogue. It contains records waiting for review and a separate audit table of records withdrawn during the preceding seven days.

Audit and policy changes

Submission, editing, resubmission, approval, publication, and withdrawal write permanent moderation events. The selected approval route and policy version are recorded with the event. Future policy versions may relax review for specific kinds or trusted uploaders without changing the scientific record definitions.

The specialised noise-model and benchmark forms do not yet provide the complete request-changes/edit/reject/withdraw cycle available for decoder, circuit, result, and machine candidates.