The Truth Contract: Pre-commit Verification as Research Integrity Infrastructure for Independent ML Researchers

Independent ML researchers do not get peer review, adversarial collaborators, or institutional ethics boards. The gap shows up as inflated claims, hallucinated citations, and silent rewrites of past failure.

I describe a lightweight integrity layer for this setting, the Truth Contract: a project-level SOUL.md document declaring forbidden phrasings, a pre-commit hook truth-lint that scans diffs and commit messages for violations, and an auto-citation verifier that blocks publish until every bibliography entry resolves against a primary source.

I describe the Mercury project's 24-hour sprint as a case study, including a real failure mode where two preprints went to permanent DOIs with bibliography errors that the verifier would have caught had it been wired in at the start. The Truth Contract did not prevent the failure; it caught the failure within hours and forced a corrigendum. That is what I claim it is for.

Companion records: Mercury method (10.5281/zenodo.20313154), Mercury-Viewer dataset (10.5281/zenodo.20313150).