What is the ROI of preservation infrastructure under a regime that does not truncate at the grant cycle?

A genuinely open question that §9 explicitly acknowledges as unmeasured: "The returns documented in Section 7.5 are measured against preservation regimes that already truncate at the grant cycle; the returns measurable against a regime that does not truncate have not yet been priced because the regime does not yet exist."

C-0031 documents the ROI cluster as 5:1 to 800:1 across studies (EMBL-EBI, ADS UK, NCRIS, XSEDE, Apon et al., PDB). C-0052 makes the load-bearing observation that these are lower bounds: every additional year of preservation extends the window during which downstream researchers can build on the data, producing the compounding reuse pattern E-0114 documents. Under Tier 3, that useful life extends to the horizon of continued scientific interest rather than the fiscal year of a funding cycle.

But: no existing study has measured what ROI looks like when the truncation goes away. The headline numbers from Q-0014 understate the architectural recommendation's return — by how much, no one yet knows, because the regime hasn't been deployed at the scale that would let anyone measure.

C-0052 partially addresses Q-0042 by arguing the direction (returns understate). The actual measurement is open for future work as Tier 3 deployments accumulate operating history.