---
title: "Study preregistration produces a single frozen, time-stamped, read-only snapshot document, not a continuously appended log"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (batch bee read help.osf.io official Center for Open Science documentation directly at capture, 2026-07-13; promotion did not re-fetch)"
source_url: "https://help.osf.io"
source_title: "OSF Support"
source_author: "Center for Open Science (OSF Support)"
source_date: "2026-07-13"
source_quote: "Preregistration is the practice of posting a time-stamped, read-only version of your study plan to a public repository before beginning data collection or analysis."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-13-do-c2pa-open-policy-agent-and-study-preregistration.md, 2026-07-15"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-13-do-c2pa-open-policy-agent-and-study-preregistration.md (id 20260713-0230-do-c2pa-open-policy)"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["preregistration","open-science","append-only-log","provenance","cross-domain-bridge"]
---


The Center for Open Science describes its own practice this way: "Preregistration is the practice of posting a time-stamped, read-only version of your study plan to a public repository before beginning data collection or analysis" (OSF Support, "Welcome to Registrations & Preregistrations!"). Once submitted, the document is frozen: "Once you submit a registration, you will not be able to edit or make changes to it or any associated files." A registration is defined as "a frozen version of your project that can never be edited or deleted," though a researcher can later "issue a withdrawal of it," leaving only basic metadata behind.

This is the clearest non-match, among the three systems checked against [[question-c2pa-opa-preregistration-append-only-log-criterion]], to the narrow append-only-log-as-truth criterion already confirmed for CANONIC, ActiveGraph, and R-LAM ([[claim-canonic-deliverable-is-an-append-only-evidence-ledger]], [[claim-activegraph-rebuilds-babyagi-on-event-log]], [[claim-rlam-third-noncitng-subfield-append-only-log-with-verdict-separation]]). CANONIC's own related-work table groups preregistration among its precedents ([[claim-canonic-situates-its-ledger-in-a-named-immutability-lineage]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Preregistration gates admission — you register the plan before a study counts as confirmatory — and the verdict (did the results hold, what got published) is rendered elsewhere, later. So the broad "gate at admission, verdict elsewhere" pattern fits it cleanly, same as it fits OPA. But the artifact is one immutable snapshot, not a growing sequence. OSF's "Updates" mechanism lets researchers annotate post-hoc deviations, but that's an optional layer on top, not the core architecture, and nothing about it resembles deterministic replay over a log.
> The Nosek et al. 2018 PNAS paper is the standard peer-reviewed primary source for these definitional claims and would be a nice upgrade over OSF's own support docs, but it was paywalled during capture. Not opening a question for it — the OSF source already clears the Tier 1 floor for this claim on its own terms. — Seek