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Agentarium

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Withdrawal Policy

Listings in Agentarium are part of the citation graph. Once a paper cites a registered agent, that citation must continue to resolve, even after the agent is taken down. This policy mirrors how arXiv handles withdrawn preprints.

What "withdrawn" means

A withdrawn agent or tool:

  • Still has a working citable URL. The URL resolves to the original listing.
  • Shows a public withdrawal notice at the top of the page: who withdrew it, when, and why.
  • Is excluded from default search results but remains accessible via direct URL and via an "include withdrawn" filter.
  • Cannot be re-published under the same version. A new version (or a successor agent) is required.

This is the academic-norm behavior. Citations don't break; readers see the withdrawal.

Voluntary withdrawal (author-initiated)

The author of an agent can withdraw their own listing at any time.

Process:

  1. Author goes to their listing → Withdraw action.
  2. Author confirms ORCID identity (re-auth required).
  3. Author provides a withdrawal reason (free text, public).
  4. Processing within 24 hours — usually instantly automated, with sanity checks before the public flip.

What stays visible:

  • The original metadata, prompt body, tool dependencies, validation block, worked example.
  • The withdrawal notice with the author's stated reason.
  • The audit log entry confirming the author's identity at withdrawal.

What's removed:

  • The listing leaves default search and filter views.
  • Notifications go to anyone who's bookmarked/followed the listing (Phase 3).

Forced withdrawal (moderator-initiated)

Moderators can force-withdraw a listing when:

  • Confirmed fabricated validation, fabricated authorship, or fabricated affiliation.
  • Endpoint has been unreachable for 90+ days and the author hasn't responded to broken-tool notifications.
  • Confirmed violation of the Code of Conduct.
  • Legal requirement (DMCA, export control, etc.).

Process:

  1. One moderator proposes the withdrawal with a written reason.
  2. A second moderator approves (or the proposing moderator is UAH staff).
  3. The author is notified and given 72 hours to respond before the public flip — except in safety/legal cases where the flip is immediate and the response window is post-hoc.
  4. Withdrawal goes live; audit log records both moderators' ORCIDs and the reason.

What stays visible:

  • The original record (so existing citations still resolve to something meaningful).
  • The forced-withdrawal notice naming the moderators and the reason category (e.g., "fabricated validation," "broken endpoint > 90 days").
  • The full audit trail.

Appeal

Forced withdrawals can be appealed once, within 30 days, per the Moderation Policy. The appeal routes to a moderator who wasn't involved in the original decision.

If the appeal is upheld:

  • The listing is restored to active status.
  • The audit log records the restoration and the appeal reason.
  • The withdrawal notice is replaced with an "incorrectly withdrawn and restored" notice for transparency.

Supersession (replace, don't withdraw)

If you're publishing a new version of your own agent, don't withdraw the old one — supersede it.

Process:

  1. New version is submitted with supersedes: <old-concept-id>.
  2. On approval, the old version's status flips to superseded, with superseded_by pointing to the new version.
  3. The old version stays citable but its detail page shows a banner: "Superseded by v1.1 — link."
  4. Default views of the agent show the latest version.

Supersession is preferred over withdrawal whenever the work continues. Withdrawal is for "this should not exist as a listed agent."

What you cannot do

  • Delete a listing. The schema is append-only. Withdrawals are public; the record stays.
  • Edit a published version's record. Edits require a new version (with supersedes).
  • Withdraw retroactively to hide errors. Bad validation numbers should be corrected via a new version with a corrected validation block. Withdrawal is for the listing as a whole.

Special case: the operator behind a tool is gone

If a tool's operator goes silent — endpoint unreachable, no response to notifications, no successor named:

  1. After 90 days, a moderator reviews. If no signal of life from the operator, the tool moves to decommissioned.
  2. All agents that depended on the tool move to degraded (already done automatically) and then are reviewed individually:
    • If the agent has other working tools, it stays active with a banner about the lost dependency.
    • If the agent depends solely on the lost tool, it moves to stale.

The tool's record stays. Listings citing it still resolve. The state of the world is communicated to the reader; no one is left guessing why something doesn't work.

Privacy and GDPR

ORCID profiles are public by design. Withdrawal records will reference ORCIDs and stated affiliations as they appeared at submission. We do not retroactively redact author identifiers from withdrawn listings — doing so would break the academic-citation guarantee.

If a withdrawn listing's author requests removal of their personal information under a binding legal requirement, the registry will replace the author block with "withdrawn by author request" and remove the ORCID reference, while keeping the rest of the listing intact.