R4 — Funders should require verifiable evidence of preservation, not self-reported plans

Audience: Funders (federal agencies, private foundations, international funders).

Action: Transition grant submission and progress reporting requirements from self-reported data management plans to verifiable evidence of deposit, distribution, and access. Specify the technical form of the evidence — content-addressed identifiers, cryptographic hashes, signed attestations from independent nodes — rather than the human-readable form of the plan.

Rationale: The compliance gap — 8% declared availability, 2% actual availability across 2.1M articles (E-0048) — is the direct consequence of a regime that measures plan existence rather than plan execution. Transitioning the reporting requirement to verifiable evidence aligns the compliance check with the architectural property that produces compliance in the first place.

The Gates Foundation's 2025 transition to automated compliance monitoring through OA.Works (E-0045, S-0068) is the reference implementation of this recommendation at the funder level. Other funders following this template would close the 8/2 gap structurally rather than through audit pressure.

R4 and R3 (C-0042) are the funder-side and institution-side of the same operational change. Adopting either alone creates friction; adopting both jointly closes the gap.