R6 — Maintain local clones and content-addressed copies of all research data

Audience: Principal investigators, laboratory directors, individual researchers.

Action: As a standard laboratory practice, maintain at least one local clone and one content-addressed copy of every research dataset. Use Git for code; use BitTorrent, IPFS, or Git large-file storage for data; use Signal-style end-to-end encryption where the data is sensitive. Treat the clone and the content-addressed copy as non-optional components of the research workflow.

Rationale: The GitHub-Iran episode (E-0009) demonstrates the difference between using Tier 3 infrastructure and capturing its resilience properties. A single local clone of a Git repository contains the complete repository history with cryptographic integrity, and its existence determines whether a Tier 1 access restriction produces permanent loss or temporary inconvenience. The recommendation is operationally trivial at the laboratory level and architecturally decisive at the institutional level.

R6 is the only recommendation aimed at the individual researcher rather than the institution or funder. It is also the recommendation with the lowest implementation cost — git clone and ipfs add are commands, not capital projects. The cumulative effect of R6 across an institution is that every individual researcher's local environment becomes an independent failure-domain copy of every dataset they work with, producing the M-0002 distribution property at zero institutional cost.

R6 is implementable today. R1-R5 require institutional or funder coordination; R6 requires only the researcher's decision to make git clone and ipfs add part of their normal workflow.