Scientific knowledge is a public good.
Its governance must be too.
The Research Governance Network (RGN) is EQUORA Institute's methodology and membership framework for research that remains accessible, verifiable, and institutionally sovereign — regardless of who funds it, governs it, or wants it gone.
Institutional science is structurally fragile
Research infrastructure built inside governments, corporations, or universities inherits their political exposure. When the institution changes direction, the knowledge disappears with it. The RGN was built to make this structurally impossible.
This is not an edge case. It is the default condition of institutionally-housed research. The RGN framework responds not through advocacy, but through architecture: by designing for sovereignty from the first line of the research plan.
Six governing principles
Every RGN member, project, and output is evaluated against these principles. They are structural requirements, not aspirational statements.
Institutional Sovereignty
Research outputs remain accessible independent of any single institution's continued existence, funding, or political alignment.
WHAT yes, HOW never
Findings, datasets, and conclusions are public goods. Methodologies, models, and tooling remain researcher IP. The boundary is explicit in every publication.
Verifiable Independence
Funding sources, institutional affiliations, and conflict-of-interest declarations are machine-readable and timestamped at submission.
Distributed Preservation
Every RGN-certified output is mirrored across at least three jurisdictionally distinct repositories. Single points of deletion do not exist.
Peer Accountability
Review is open, attributed, and versioned. Reviewers are acknowledged as intellectual contributors. Disagreements are part of the record.
Community Stewardship
The community that produces research governs it. No external actor — funder, state, or platform — holds unilateral control over access or continuation.
The RGN certification framework
A five-phase process from inception to institutionally sovereign, permanently accessible output.
Independence Audit
The research project undergoes a structured conflict-of-interest and institutional-dependency audit. Funding chains, data source ownership, and platform dependencies are mapped and disclosed. Projects with unresolvable single points of institutional control are flagged before work begins — not after publication.
Sovereignty Design
Data storage, versioning, and access paths are designed for distributed resilience. The WHAT/HOW boundary is formally documented: which elements are released as public good, which are retained as researcher IP. This boundary cannot be changed retroactively.
Open Peer Review
Attributed review by RGN network members. Reviewers declare their own COI status. Reviews are versioned and published alongside the output. Disagreements are part of the record, not resolved by editorial gatekeeping. The Iterators community feeds specialist reviewers across domains.
Multi-Repository Release
Simultaneous release across Zenodo (DOI), IPFS, and at least one jurisdictionally distinct institutional mirror. A cryptographic integrity hash is registered on a public ledger. The research cannot be taken down by any single actor — institutional, governmental, or commercial.
Living Governance
Ongoing access monitoring, community update cycles, and conflict-of-interest re-audits at defined intervals. Updates are versioned — not silently replaced. The governance community can trigger a full re-review if new evidence materially affects conclusions.
Network tiers
RGN participation is open and tiered. Contribution — not institutional affiliation — determines standing.
Full RGN Certification
- Complete 5-phase certification
- DOI + multi-mirror publication
- IP Boundary Statement filed
- Listed in RGN public registry
- Access to peer review pool
- Governance voting rights
Peer Review Participation
- Attributed open review
- COI declaration on record
- Cross-domain via Iterators
- Reviewer DOI attribution
- Pre-publication draft access
- Participation in re-audits
Community Steward
- Access to all public outputs
- Participate in governance votes
- Flag integrity concerns
- Nominate reviewers
- Iterators community access
- RGN newsletter updates
The WHAT / HOW boundary
The RGN's core IP discipline distinguishes what is shared from how it was produced. This boundary protects researchers while maximising public value — and must be declared at Phase 02.
- Findings and conclusions
- Datasets used (where legally possible)
- Conflict-of-interest declarations
- Peer review records and dissent
- Full version history
- All funding sources
- Mirror and access locations
- Models and algorithms
- Analysis pipelines and tooling
- Unpublished experimental designs
- Training data compositions
- Internal workflow automation
- Commercial service implementations
- Proprietary instrumentation
The WHAT/HOW boundary is declared at Phase 02 and cannot be revised retroactively. If a researcher wishes to commercialise a methodology after publication, the published findings remain public regardless.
RGN across the Equora ecosystem
The Research Governance Network connects to every layer of the EQUORA Institute — from community review to hardware-level data sovereignty.
Cross-domain Review Pool
The Iterators community functions as the RGN's interdisciplinary peer review layer — connecting researchers across domains who would not otherwise encounter each other's work. Iterators with relevant expertise are invited as Network Reviewers.
Hardware-level Data Sovereignty
EquoraVault's DePIN architecture mirrors the RGN's governance logic at the hardware layer — sensor data that is device-signed, network-validated, and never controlled by a single operator. "Mérünk, nem becslünk."
Ecological Data Stewardship
Environmental and ecological research certified by RGN feeds the GoHalve dual ledger — ensuring that impact data meets the same sovereignty and verifiability standards as the research underpinning it.
Research that cannot be
quietly taken down.
Whether you are an independent researcher, a domain expert willing to review, or an institution looking to certify its outputs — the RGN has a place for you.