Every loss mode reduces to single-copy dependency

The four categories developed in §3 — personnel turnover (C-0017), physical and technical loss (C-0018), funding termination (C-0019), and platform discontinuation (C-0020) — describe triggers that differ substantially in their immediate cause. A graduate student's departure, a data center fire, a grant termination, and a platform acquisition occupy different positions in the operational life of a research institution, require different administrative responses, and are managed by different people.

They share one property. Each of them destroys a specific dataset only when that dataset exists in a single copy within a single failure domain. Each of them is absorbed without permanent loss when independent copies exist across independent failure domains.

This is the architectural claim of the paper reduced to its operational form. The mechanisms documented in §3 are the normal operating conditions of centralized research data infrastructure. Every research institution experiences some of them every year. Whether a given dataset survives is determined by how many independent copies exist across independent failure domains when the triggering event occurs.

The reduction from four mechanisms to a single property is what makes C-0001 a structural claim rather than a list of separate problems. A regime that addresses the four mechanisms separately — better PI offboarding, better backups, longer grant terms, alternative platforms — does not converge on the same outcome as a regime that addresses the single underlying property. The former is procedural; the latter is architectural. C-0001 asserts that only the latter works.