What should funders do to align incentives with verifiable preservation?

A subsidiary question under Q-0008. The funder side of the recommendation regime has two elements: what funders require from grantees, and how funders structure the funding mechanism.

The answer is the funder cluster:

• R4 (C-0043): 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. The Gates Foundation's 2025 transition to OA.Works automated compliance monitoring is the reference implementation.
• R5 (C-0044): Include preservation infrastructure as a recognized category in facilities-and-administrative cost rate calculations, treating preservation as a continuing facilities cost rather than a project-scoped expense. NASEM 2020 documented the structural misalignment: "the current system for funding research is not conducive to data life-cycle cost forecasting." Grants run 3-5 years; preservation needs run decades.

R4 closes the 8/2 declaration-vs-delivery gap structurally. R5 closes the architectural-vs-funding-cycle mismatch that produces the §3.1 and §3.3 failure modes.