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Chapter 34: Industry Paper Handoff to NEXUS

New in v1.4.3. Where Chapter 33 delegates IP to PHOENIX, this chapter delegates academic and industry-paper publication to NEXUS (the Research Center). FCC drafts the abstract, the outline, and the citation graph; the Research Center extends, submits, and tracks the paper through venue acceptance. This is the v1.4.3 mirror of the patent delegation — different destination, same discipline.

Why delegate industry papers

Industry paper submission is a specialised workflow. It requires familiarity with venues (ACM, IEEE, arXiv, domain journals), conference calendars, citation-graph discipline, revision cycles, and the administrative overhead of author-order negotiation. FCC is a framework repository; none of that is in its core competence.

NEXUS — the Research Center project at rc-research-center/nexus — is in that business. v2.1.0 added the PI-2026-Q3 portfolio with explicit paper-submission capacity and FORNAX/Distiller as a Tier-1 partner. NEXUS is also the authority for the ecosystem registry (ecosystem_projects.yaml and port_allocation.yaml), which FCC vendors in via SHA256 drift-test as of v1.3.5.4.

Delegating to NEXUS means FCC owns the intellectual contribution (the insight, the framework, the citation graph) and NEXUS owns the publication contribution (venue matching, revisions, submission).

Licensing split

One decision that is worth calling out up front: FCC and NEXUS use different licences for different artefacts, and the split is intentional.

  • FCC's reference implementation — MIT licence.
  • NEXUS-published papers — CC-BY-4.0.

The split matters because papers are prose artefacts, implementations are code artefacts, and the communities have different licensing norms. CC-BY-4.0 on the paper means any reader can cite, quote, and remix the prose; MIT on the code means any reader can adopt the implementation with attribution. The two together give the broadest downstream utility.

The CC-BY-4.0 licence is declared in every handoff package. NEXUS enforces it on the paper side; FCC checks it in the QG-RHL quality gate on the handoff.

The four-step handoff

The handoff flow has four steps, each owned by a persona:

sequenceDiagram
    participant Con as FCC contributor
    participant IEA as IEA persona (FCC)
    participant RHL as RHL persona (FCC)
    participant NEX as NEXUS repo
    participant Ed as Venue editor

    Con->>IEA: Draft insight + evidence
    IEA->>IEA: Triage + citation-graph sketch
    IEA->>RHL: Handoff package<br/>(abstract, outline, citations)
    RHL->>NEX: Cross-repo PR to<br/>nexus/papers/<slug>/

    Note over NEX: NEXUS extends:<br/>methods, results,<br/>discussion, revisions

    NEX->>Ed: Submit to venue
    Ed-->>NEX: Review cycle
    NEX-->>RHL: Acceptance + DOI
    RHL-->>Con: Back-populate citations

The steps:

  1. Draft on FCC. A contributor writes a first pass — insight, outline, citation graph — as a new file under docs/papers/drafts/<slug>.md. The IEA persona triages for novelty and prior-art risk, the same triage as patent candidates.
  2. RHL package. The RHL (Research Handoff Liaison) persona — new in v1.4.3 — assembles the handoff package: abstract, outline, citations, FCC-side licence attestation (MIT for any code referenced), target-venue suggestion list. The package is an IMRaD-compatible skeleton so NEXUS can extend in place.
  3. Cross-repo PR to NEXUS. RHL opens a PR on NEXUS against papers/drafts/<slug>/. NEXUS runs its own quality gates (including paper-authorship attestation) and merges.
  4. NEXUS extension and submission. NEXUS extends the paper through methods, results, and discussion. Submission, revision cycles, and DOI registration are NEXUS responsibilities. Once accepted, NEXUS notifies RHL, which back-populates the citation into FCC docs and codebase comments where relevant.

The two v1.4.3 paper drafts

v1.4.3 seeds the handoff pipeline with two paper drafts that are already in the RHL package form:

Paper 1 — Quantum-Locality Metrics for Agent-Team Frameworks

Working title: Quantum-Locality as a Metric for Temporal-Spatial Coordination in Agent-Team Frameworks.

Thesis: the "blue-ocean-vs-blue-pearl" framing (introduced in the Scott Martin data-ocean conversation during v1.3.x ideation) can be formalised as a quantum-locality metric that captures both the temporal dimension (how stale is this agent's worldview?) and the spatial dimension (how far in the ecosystem graph is the authoritative source?). The metric is computable on the FCC event bus using the lane-classified spans introduced in Chapter 32.

Authorship: FCC drafts + RC extends. Target venue: a systems journal or conference with explicit interest in agent frameworks.

Paper 2 — Zachman × R.I.S.C.E.A.R. × SAFe Tri-Axial Composition

Working title: Tri-Axial Composition of Zachman, R.I.S.C.E.A.R., and SAFe for Multi-Repo Ecosystem Governance.

Thesis: the three frameworks — Zachman's 6×6 information-system taxonomy, FCC's R.I.S.C.E.A.R. 10-element persona specification, and SAFe 6.0's portfolio/PI vocabulary — compose along three orthogonal axes and can be used together without collision. The paper presents the reconciliation table (see Chapter 35) as the canonical composition artefact.

Authorship: FCC drafts + RC extends. Target venue: an enterprise-architecture or software-architecture venue.

Both drafts live in the FCC repo under docs/papers/drafts/ in v1.4.3. Once RHL opens the cross-repo PRs, authoritative residence shifts to NEXUS.

The IMRaD template and {TODO: verify} discipline

Every handoff draft follows the IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) so NEXUS can extend without re-structuring. FCC's skeleton typically has:

  • Introduction — full draft on FCC.
  • Methods — FCC drafts the methodology as it relates to the framework; NEXUS extends with experiment design.
  • Results — placeholders on FCC; NEXUS fills with data.
  • Discussion — FCC drafts the framework-level implications; NEXUS extends with empirical discussion.

Throughout the draft, {TODO: verify} markers flag every claim that needs NEXUS confirmation. A well-formed handoff has zero claims without either a citation or a {TODO: verify} marker. The RHL persona enforces this: a handoff package with unverified claims and no markers is bounced back to the drafter.

The RHL persona

RHL — Research Handoff Liaison (category jv_collaboration) is the persona that owns the FCC side of this delegation. Its responsibilities:

  • Review every docs/papers/drafts/<slug>.md for handoff readiness.
  • Assemble the RHL package (abstract, outline, citations, licence attestation, IMRaD skeleton, venue suggestion list).
  • Open and track the cross-repo PR on NEXUS.
  • Back-populate accepted DOIs into FCC once papers publish.
  • Coordinate with IHL on papers that also touch patent delegation (so the same insight doesn't get filed twice with divergent claims).

RHL's constitution is tiered: hard-stop on licence mismatch, mandatory on IMRaD completeness, preferred on venue-match quality.

Coordination with patent delegation

Some insights are patentable and publishable. When they are, the RHL and IHL personas coordinate on two rules:

  1. Filing before publication. If the insight is going to be filed as a patent (via IHL to PHOENIX), the filing is completed or a provisional is in place before RHL opens the NEXUS PR. This preserves the novelty-at-filing requirement in most jurisdictions.
  2. Language alignment. The patent claim language and the paper abstract should not contradict each other. PCT (Patent Claim Tracer, Chapter 33) runs a cross-check when both artefacts exist for the same slug.

The coordination is documented per-PI by the SFBI persona (Chapter 31) as part of the portfolio epic review.

How this interacts with SAFe

The industry-paper pipeline is a portfolio epic (see Chapter 31). Each paper is a Feature inside the epic; each revision cycle is an Iteration's worth of work. The Docs ART owns the drafting side; the Ecosystem ART owns the handoff coordination with NEXUS.

Flow metrics tracked by SMC include:

  • Draft-to-handoff time (FCC side).
  • Handoff-to-submission time (NEXUS side).
  • Submission-to-acceptance time (venue side).
  • Acceptance-to-back-population time (FCC side).

A paper that sits for more than one PI at any of these stages is flagged for portfolio review.

Key takeaways

  • NEXUS (Research Center) is the ecosystem's authority for industry-paper publication from v1.4.3 onward.
  • FCC drafts the insight in IMRaD skeleton form; NEXUS extends, submits, and tracks.
  • Papers are CC-BY-4.0; the reference implementation is MIT. The split is intentional.
  • The RHL persona owns the handoff; IHL and RHL coordinate when an insight is both publishable and patentable.
  • Two drafts seed the pipeline in v1.4.3: a quantum-locality metrics paper and a Zachman × R.I.S.C.E.A.R. × SAFe composition paper.
  • {TODO: verify} markers are the canonical discipline for unverified claims in a handoff.