Research data loss is architectural, not operational

The losses documented in the empirical record on research data preservation are produced by structural properties of the storage substrate rather than by behaviors that procedural reform can fix. Operational explanations — insufficient training, inadequate data management plans, uneven researcher discipline, underfunded libraries — identify real problems, and addressing them produces real but bounded improvements. What operational explanations do not address is the underlying property that makes the losses possible in the first place: research data typically exists in a single copy, held by a single organization, funded by a single grant, maintained by a single person. Each of those is a single point of failure, and in most research environments they coincide.

The claim is causal: if the loss-producing mechanisms catalogued in §3 (M-0005) operate on single-copy architecture and are absorbed without loss on distributed architecture, then the architecture determines the outcome and procedural reforms layered on top of single-copy storage cannot change the result. The Four-Tier Taxonomy (M-0001) supplies the structural vocabulary; the empirical evidence in §3 supplies the case-by-case demonstration.

This is the central argument of the paper. Every subsequent Claim about cost, prevention, and verification rests on it.