Governing Against Domestication: A Governance Framework for Distributed Scientific Reproducibility Validation

Abstract The reproducibility crisis in science is widely documented, but most reform efforts share a structural flaw: they rely on institutional goodwill that institutions are not reliably able to sustain. Data mandates go unenforced. Repository requirements produce unusable deposits. Peer review rarely attempts reproduction. The policies exist. They are domesticated — hollowed out through accumulated accommodation until nothing remains worth defending. This paper presents a governance framework for distributed scientific reproducibility validation systems: systems that coordinate independent validators to assess whether published computational research can actually be reproduced, and that issue structured, tamper-evident records of the outcome. The framework's central argument is that technical architecture alone cannot ensure epistemic integrity — the institutional forces that corrupted previous reform efforts will operate on any new system unless governance is designed from the outset to resist them. We describe six non-negotiable epistemic commitments, a tiered governance architecture that scales with operational maturity, nine mechanical anti-domestication defences against the two most likely capture scenarios, and a set of red lines that cannot be conceded regardless of institutional pressure. The framework is implemented in ValiChord, an open-source peer-to-peer infrastructure for reproducibility validation built on Holochain (https://github.com/topeuph-ai/ValiChord), and is offered as a general template for any reproducibility validation system that intends to remain honest under pressure.