Preservation horizon decouples from project budget

Under the current regime, research data has the useful life of its originating grant — three to five years, after which maintenance ends and the data enters the §3 failure modes. Under Tier 3, preservation is a byproduct of participation rather than a line item on a time-bounded award.

Longitudinal cohorts, ecological time series, and cross-decade measurement studies — the class of research for which a 63-year yellow-bellied marmot record is the exception rather than the norm (E-0020) — become structurally supportable instead of heroically sustained. The time horizon of preservation aligns with the time horizon of scientific inquiry rather than with the fiscal year of a grant cycle.

The architectural property: nodes participating in Tier 3 protocols continue to hold the data after the grant that originally funded the deposit terminates, because there is no operational dependency between the grant and the continued node operation. The data persists wherever it has been replicated, on whatever timeline the participating nodes choose to operate, regardless of the originating grant's status.

This Claim is one of the strongest direct connections between the architectural argument (Q-0002) and the funding-policy argument (R5). R5 — fund preservation through facilities-and-administrative cost recovery — is the policy expression of the same property: align the duration of funding with the duration of preservation need. Tier 3 architecture supplies the technical mechanism by which the funding-architecture mismatch becomes operationally tractable.