Preservation without possession: Content-addressable identifiers for post-custodial preservation

Content-addressable identification of scholarly resources enables new, post-custodial methods for achieving sustainable persistence of the scholarly record. Instead of continued reliance on traditional notions of centralized custodial management, post-custodial stewardship focuses on applying meaningful curatorial services to resources wherever they most naturally reside. In essence, it replaces the constraining necessity to *hold* content locally with an open-ended ability to *reference* it freely and actionably. This requires a robust infrastructure for global identification of scholarly assets through massively-distributed content-addressable solutions like IPFS or Dat.