# paper.json: A Coordination Convention for LLM-Agent-Actionable Papers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16194/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 5 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01833/) (2022)
- [ExpertQA: Expert-Curated Questions and Attributed Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07852/) (2023)
- [Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06503/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Factual Consistency of Summaries with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14069/) (2023)
- [Open Research Knowledge Graph:A System Walkthrough](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01439/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM agents routinely serve as first (and sometimes only) readers of academic papers, skimming for sub-claims, extracting reproducibility steps, and generalizing scope. Standard prose papers produce recurring failures in this role: sub-claims that cannot be cited at sub-paper granularity, scope overextension beyond what the paper tests, and figure commands buried in codebases rather than the paper itself. We propose `paper.json`, a companion JSON file that travels with the PDF and addresses each failure with a lightweight convention: stable claim IDs (C1), an explicit does-not-claim list (C2), exact per-figure shell commands (C3), and stable definition IDs (C5). A fifth convention (C4) holds that minimum viable compliance, hand-written JSON alongside the PDF, is achievable in under an hour for a finished paper without touching the human-readable output. C1, C2, C3, and C5 are open invitations: an agent that reads a compliant paper and acts on it produces evidence for or against them. This paper is itself compliant: `uv run validator.py paper.json --against paper.typ` passes. Repo: https://github.com/arquicanedo/paper-json