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Root reading: researcher-side application evidence

9 September2026. Root read the complete substantive retained tracker page and its HTML table row/rowspan structure, the entry-page body, and the short issue-tracker body. Policy Paper14 (September2025) was text-read at PDF1-5,12-13,35-36 and38 only; no full38page reading or visual audit. The root webreader timed out on the tracker; already acquired worker original supplied the substantive reading. No fresh duplicate GET, account, survey submission or personal request records.

The tracker updates to8September2026 and reports70 complete registered applications,51 decisions,24 acceptances and27 rejections. The HTML table actually sums to68:24 accepted,27 rejected,17 open. Its public/nonpublic categories sum to60 and8 respectively. The homepage reports61 public-data applications and70 overall; neither exactly matches the table. No explanation for the two-record difference was acquired. Treat the denominator as unreconciled; do not silently repair it, infer fraud, or compute a whole-platform acceptance rate. These are voluntarily reported applications, not an inventory of all requests to platforms.

Its AliExpress row is one public-data entry marked open. The page supplies no application date, applicant identity, precise statutory paragraph, original text or correspondence for that entry. It cannot be matched to the prior FTI audit period or to GDI. More generally, requested public/nonpublic data is not enough to establish the legal route: Article40(4) can also be used for some public data. The policy paper separately discusses40(12) and40(4); it does not furnish individual tracker routing.

The rejection section offers an unattributed purpose-limitation quotation and category counts. Purpose limitation5, necessity/proportionality2, incomplete1, request/application mismatch1, university-affiliation1, EU-location2 sum to12, not27 total rejections; coverage and possible overlap are unspecified. The organisers label the latter affiliation/location reasons invalid. That is their legal assessment, not an acquired ruling or visible application/response pair. Prior accepted legal text supports distinguishing eligibility criteria from blanket affiliation/location exclusions; it cannot decide an unacquired individual application. Only27 entries supplied application text, and12 explicitly mentioned Article34; neither this denominator nor listed methods/risks describes all70 registrations. Categories can overlap and are not demonstrated decision causes.

The issue page's separate statements concern practical availability and quality. It currently reports no known critical issues, while listing historical Meta submission unavailability and TikTok API missing data. These are organiser-verified issue accounts with no supporting incident logs read here. Lack of a current listed critical issue does not mean every application succeeds or every dataset is complete. Authorisation, technically usable delivery and researcher judgment remain separate steps.

PolicyPDF2 attributes this joint Collaboratory project to Mercator Stiftung funding and says some paper authors lead it. The Weizenbaum Institute's separate institutional funding statement names the German federal ministry (BMFTR) and State of Berlin. A project grant and host-institution support are different resources; no amounts, donor conditions or reviewer rights are disclosed in these pages. The title-page author list and current homepage team are different dated roles and should not be collapsed into identical governance.

PDF35 explicitly describes researcher self-reporting, application support and emerging intermediaries; it advocates active EU/member-state support for such roles. This is a substantive institutional connection: the same initiative gathers reports, helps applicants, and informs regulatory discussion. It makes the dataset valuable for finding failure cases and clarifying process, while also requiring attention to self-selection and advocacy context. It is neither a regulator's adjudication log nor inherently disqualified by its advocacy. The page identifies other networks as examples, without proving funding, control or case-specific coordination among them.

This run still lacks the desired public application/response pair. The acquired records narrow the validity question to identifiable tests and separate evidentiary layers. The next acquisition must follow the forest review after this packet closes; no expansion to all listed networks is authorized by this note alone.

Root continuation also text-read PDF12-13 (provider or surrogate vetting; dated reported application obstacles, remedies proposed),36 (advocacy for sustained public funding) and38 (imprint and CC BY4.0). The original application/response bundle remains unacquired. Explicit table arithmetic corrected an initial unaccepted root assumption that the homepage public-data count matched the table; actual60public/8nonpublic are preserved above. This was a root synthesis correction, not a change to source data or the worker's correct68/70 finding.