Release Architecture in Research Archives: Transaction Costs, Visibility Regimes, and Identifier Governance Across MPRA, Zenodo, arXiv, and SSRN

This paper develops a positive, comparative framework for “release architecture” in research archives—treating platforms as governance structures for disclosure. Using transaction cost economics and a complementary visibility/discipline lens, it codes MPRA, Zenodo, arXiv, and SSRN on five institutional variables (selective disclosure, rejection potential, posting latency, withdrawal hardness, and identifier regime) and outlines a measurement strategy linking these features to observable outcomes such as latency tails, withdrawal modalities, metadata completeness, and cross-platform linkage quality.