Working paper ≠ peer reviewed
A public conceptual paper may be substantial, cited, and institutionally approved while still not having undergone external scholarly peer review.
Institutional standards / versioned policy
Standards for making claims about minds unlike our own.
Xenopsychology separates what was imagined, proposed, observed, measured, interpreted, reviewed, and published. These standards make those distinctions visible to readers and researchers.
Scientific credibility depends as much on status labels and correction practices as it does on prose. The standards below define how Xenopsychology describes evidence, review, AI assistance, ethics, sources, and changes to the scholarly record.
Institutional Standards R1Version 1.0.0Effective 2026-09-21Public policy layer
OPERATING PRINCIPLES
Make the status of a claim as inspectable as the claim itself.
01
Label the evidence class before presenting the conclusion.
02
State review status in language that cannot be mistaken for external peer review.
03
Preserve provenance, raw evidence, and superseded public versions when scientifically relevant.
04
Separate observation, behavioral coding, measurement, interpretation, and claim.
05
Disclose meaningful AI assistance and keep human responsibility explicit.
06
Use fiction and cultural material as conceptual sources, not empirical evidence about present systems.
07
Prefer primary sources and stable, version-aware citations wherever possible.
CURRENT STANDARDS
Seven policies governing the public research record.
Each standard is independently citable, versioned, and intended to be read alongside the Research Library and Observatory.
01 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Publication Policy
What Xenopsychology publishes, how publication types are labeled, and the minimum disclosures required before an item becomes part of the public scholarly record.
READ STANDARD →02 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Evidence Classes
The evidence taxonomy used across the Research Library so conceptual analysis, methodology, and empirical observation can inform one another without becoming interchangeable.
READ STANDARD →03 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Review Status
A controlled vocabulary for review status, designed to prevent internal review, editorial review, software verification, and external peer review from being conflated.
READ STANDARD →04 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Corrections & Versioning
How Xenopsychology distinguishes minor corrections, substantive revisions, supersession, withdrawal, and retraction while preserving an intelligible scholarly record.
READ STANDARD →05 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
AI-Use Disclosure
How meaningful use of generative AI in writing, coding, analysis, or research workflow is disclosed without transferring human scholarly responsibility to a model.
READ STANDARD →06 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Research Ethics
Research boundaries for evidence integrity, privacy, human and animal subjects, artificial-system experimentation, and claims about inner experience.
READ STANDARD →07 / 07STANDARD 1.0.0
Citation Policy
Citation practices for conceptual scholarship, fiction-informed analysis, model outputs, empirical records, software, and versioned Xenopsychology publications.
READ STANDARD →STATUS LANGUAGE
Three distinctions that should never be implied away.
Internal review ≠ external review
Editorial review, software verification, AI critique, and Observatory publication gates have value, but they must retain their actual names.
Observation ≠ inner experience
Behavior can be measured directly. Claims about consciousness, personhood, or phenomenology require evidence beyond behavioral resemblance alone.
MACHINE-READABLE POLICY
A public catalog for tools, archives, and future research systems.
The standards index exposes policy version, effective date, routes, summaries, and institutional principles without requiring page scraping.