research-packs Handbook

research-packs is a public archive monorepo where every frozen research-os pack lives as a versioned package. Every pack carries its full evidence base — source cards, claim ledgers, adversarial review history, contradiction resolutions, gate results, and a sha256 freeze receipt that fingerprints every canonical artifact.

This handbook covers three things:

1. Getting Started — clone, install, verify your first pack
2. Reading Packs — how to navigate the three lanes of a pack
3. Reference — pack manifest schema, admission contract, verify-pack usage
4. Architecture — three-lane design and the research-os relationship

What is a frozen pack?

A frozen pack is a research artifact that has passed all gates and received a cryptographic freeze receipt. The receipt contains sha256 fingerprints of every canonical artifact — source cards, claim ledgers, review records, gate outputs, and synthesis files. Running verify-pack.mjs recomputes every fingerprint and confirms byte-for-byte integrity.

Frozen means the evidence base cannot change. If a claim is wrong, the pack must be superseded by a new pack, not silently amended.

What is research-os?

research-os is a gated research control plane that enforces: no synthesis before source truth. It manages the full pipeline — source discovery, excerpt extraction, claim triage, adversarial review, contradiction detection, gate evaluation, and freeze. Every pack in this archive was produced by research-os.