Fabricated citations in biomedicine increased tenfold in three years, and 98.4% of flagged papers remain uncorrected. The automated enforcement wave is arriving, but it carries false-positive rates that hit honest authors hardest. This working paper proposes a five-level fault ladder and a Source Provenance Ledger that makes verification effort visible, producible on challenge, and driven by market adoption rather than mandates.
fault-based publication ethics
SCOPE: SOURCE CUSTODY OBSERVABLE PUBLICATION EVIDENCE
Your citations are only as strong as the record behind them. HAIA-SCOPE is a three-tier documentation protocol that records what you verified, when you verified it, and where the preserved copy lives. The record stays private until you need it. When automated enforcement flags your work or a reviewer challenges a citation, only the author who maintained a SCOPE record can produce one.