imbad0202__academic-research-skills/docs/ROADMAP-v3.11.md

v3.11 Roadmap (draft)

Status: DRAFT — candidate scoping inferred from open issues, not a commitment. Date: 2026-06-01 (just after v3.10.0). How this was built: the repo has no milestone mechanism; this draft is synthesized from the open-issue set as of v3.10.0 ship. Every item links its source issue. Priorities and final selection are the owner's call — this is a menu, not a plan of record.

Theme candidate: provenance + calibration hardening across artifact types — almost every mature open item EXTENDS existing machinery (claim decomposition, field-norm calibration, citation verification, instruction/data boundary) rather than introducing a greenfield system, which keeps v3.11 scope tractable. The alternative framing is a narrower citation-integrity release anchored on the one P0 (#182).

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Tier 0 — ship-early, dependency-free (do regardless of theme)

The Co-Scientist design-lesson docs are S-scope, pure documentation, no code, no dependencies — and #223 (L4) updates the paper-derived issue template, which every future paper-derived sub-issue depends on. Landing these first costs little and unblocks the boundary discipline for everything else.

• #220 Co-Scientist L1 — hidden-ranking red line (design-lesson doc)
• #221 Co-Scientist L2 — feedback-propagation user-approval gate (design-lesson doc)
• #222 Co-Scientist L3 — transferable vs non-transferable mechanisms (transfer matrix)
• #223 Co-Scientist L4 — control-plane ownership (who may write / rank / route) + issue-template update
• Parent epic: #219

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Tier 1 — mature spec, no blocking deps, high leverage

Citation integrity (the one self-assessed P0)

• #182 — Deterministic citation verification gate (Crossref/DOI/arXiv/PubMed lookup + source-text anchor; three status columns lookup_verified / anchor_present / reviewer_approved; a draft with any lookup_verified: false cannot reach "ready for human review"). Scope: L (new resolver module + caching + schema + tests). The #184 eval harness already left a hook ("verify_citation has not shipped — reconcile when it does"), so this closes a known forward-reference. Highest leverage in the citation cluster.
  • Note (raised in review): the gate FLAGS unverified citations (they stay visible — it is not hidden culling, so it does not cross the Co-Scientist L1 hidden-ranking red line). But "a draft cannot reach ready-for-review" is a deterministic block, and ARS philosophy is "the human decides at every gate." The #182 spec should state explicitly whether this block is hard (auto) or surfaced-for-human-override, so it reads as a flag-and-surface gate, not an AI culling decision. This is a #182 spec clarification, not a roadmap blocker.
  • #250 (historical accepted limitation; no action item) — the static gold corpus has no stable, first-party-verifiable real work unmatched across all four resolvers, so its false class is exercised only by fabricated tuples. This is a representativeness limit, not a missing title-match regression: #431/#432 fixed and directly test resolver-client behavior.

Kim et al. peer-review failure modes (epic #217)

All four sub-issues have full specs naming exact files/lines.

• #213 — Decompose multi-part claims before citation judgment (adds Step 0 sub-claim split + PARTIAL verdict; addresses the 76% partial-evidence error class). M
• #214 — Sub-claim inventory before consensus aggregation in editorial_synthesizer (inventory primary key Weakness → sub_claim). Independently shippable from #213 (no hard blocking dependency), but coordinate the sub_claim shape/vocabulary with #213 — both introduce sub-claim-level reasoning at different layers (citation vs synthesis) and will drift if specced separately. Land them in one pass or share the schema. M
• #215 — Field-norm severity calibration (domain_reviewer must cite external literature for field-norm claims; DA gains field_norm_boundary; calibration miscalibration histogram). M
• #216 — Reviewer-type asymmetry parity audit in Devil's Advocate (4th anti-sycophancy rule). DA text change is S; the authorship-metadata design question splits off as a separate, larger decision — not required to ship the text change.

Kong et al. Tier A — ALL SHIPPED (no v3.11 work here; see stale-open cleanup below)

Cross-checked against git history (not just issue state): the entire Kong Tier A is already in v3.10, even though several issues are still OPEN.

• A1 #256 — shipped (Schema 11 ledger + follow-ups #266/#268/#269).
• A2 #257 — shipped via #270 feat: add idea-diversity advisories (commit 9f60d11, before the v3.10.0 tag).
• A3 #258 — shipped via #267 feat: add version-family citation reconciliation (commit 48378bb, before the v3.10.0 tag).
• A4 #259 — shipped (CLOSED).

→ #256 / #257 / #258 are open-but-shipped stale issues, NOT v3.11 work. See the stale-open cleanup item under Tier 2.

Opus 4.8 behavioral-signal cluster (recent, 2026-05-29)

• #273 — Calibration may be optimistic under same-model / rubric-aware judging; recommend cross-model evaluation as opt-in "for best results" (epistemic framing, not a gate). S
• #274 — Concise reviewer output + a behavioral check that hard boundaries / DA non-softening hold under 4.8 after user pushback (guidance + verification). S
• #272 — Treat retrieved external content as data, not instructions. This is a separate, still-open SAFETY TRACK, not a low-cost guidance add. The #134 design spec (§ "open items", line ~138) is explicit: "#272 remains a separate, still-open safety track … #134 must NOT close #272 or claim any mitigation … revisit #272's home only when a concrete envelope substrate exists (Slice 3+)." Do NOT co-locate #272 with #134 or treat it as a quick guidance patch. If taken on in v3.11, it needs its own design pass on the instruction/data trust boundary — scope accordingly, or defer until the envelope substrate exists. (Resolved against the #134 spec text, which is explicit on this point.)

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Tier 2 — deferred-from-v3.10 + hygiene (S each)

• #160 — Move scripts/_test_helpers.py → tests/test_helpers.py (drop the sys.path hack across ~24 import sites). defer:v3.10.
• #151 — Evaluate generic repo-hygiene CI (gitleaks / detect-secrets). defer:v3.10; scope explicitly constrained to avoid maintainer-specific rules in a public repo.
• #138 — Parallelize OpenAlex + Crossref calls per entry in the migration script (ThreadPoolExecutor, ~halves backfill wait). Verify the script is still the right target post-v3.10.
• #242 — venue_disclosure_policies.md ACL row: revisit canonical source (Admin Wiki URL returns HTTP 418 to curl → needs a CI link-checker exemption or alternate URL).
• Stale-open issue cleanup (not feature work, but do it this cycle). Several Kong issues are OPEN but their implementation already shipped in v3.10 — git history confirms, even though the issues never got auto-closed: #256 (A1, via #266/#268/#269), #257 (A2, via #270 9f60d11), #258 (A3, via #267 48378bb), and #259/#263 (already CLOSED). Verify each against the merged work and close. Leaving them open distorts any future roadmap read (this very draft's first pass mis-scoped #257/#258 as v3.11 work because they looked open).

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Tier 3 — needs an owner decision before scoping

• #89 Item 7 — diff/patch revision mode. Ranked #1 by #89's own analysis as the highest- leverage unfiled work; no design doc, no dedicated issue. To take it on, write a spec first. Decide consciously: scope into v3.11 or defer.
• #244 (external — TriggerMinds "Structural Limitations" critique). Not a proposal; a discussion thread. Its two actionable children — #246 (discipline-relative grading, also cross-linked from Kong A4 #259) and #247 (dual-use scope clarification) — already shipped and closed (#280 docs(#246,#247), Closes #246 / Closes #247). So #244 itself is now "verify residual discussion → likely close or re-scope," NOT waiting on children.

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Explicitly NOT in v3.11 (per source epics)

• Kong Tier B (#260 / #261 / #262) — the Kong epic #255 tags B-track as a v3.12 candidate, not v3.11. (B1 experiment provenance, B2 figure/table fidelity, B3 cross-paper contradiction — all have full specs and could be pulled forward, but the epic's own tiering puts them after v3.11.)
• The anti-pattern non-features the source epics list as first-class rejections (autonomous idea generation, autonomous experiment execution, hidden ranking, open-ended self-play). These are boundary entries for POSITIONING.md / NEGATIVE_SCOPE.md, not features.

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Open questions for the owner

1. Theme: broad "provenance + calibration hardening" (Kim subs + #182 + Opus-4.8 guidance) vs a narrow "citation-integrity release" (#182-centered)? Note Kong Tier A is already shipped, so the v3.11 substance is really #182 + Kim (#213-216) + the two Opus-4.8 guidance items (#273/#274), with the Co-Scientist docs as the cheap Tier 0 opener.
2. #272 (instruction/data boundary): the #134 spec quarantines it as a separate safety track needing an envelope substrate. Take it on in v3.11 as its own design pass, or defer until the substrate exists? (Do NOT fold it into general guidance.)
3. #89 Item 7 (diff/patch revision): the highest-leverage unfiled item — scope a design doc for v3.11, or defer?
4. Pull Kong Tier B (#260/261/262) forward? Specs are ready; only the epic's tiering holds them at v3.12.