Contemporary intellectual production unfolds within a stratified apparatus whose constituent platforms operate according to logics neither synonymous nor symmetrical, compelling the researcher to function as deliberate designer rather than passive producer of discourse. This infrastructural orchestration updates the classical Republic of Letters into an interlocking ecology where legitimacy accrues through sequential yet interdependent movements across differentiated tiers, each fulfilling a discrete epistemic role without redundancy or automatic progression. The foundational stratum secures ontological inscription by assigning a persistent identifier that renders the manuscript locatable and citable within distributed repositories, converting private composition into publicly indexable matter whose juridical durability stems solely from its traceability rather than any evaluative judgement. Platforms dedicated to open archiving bind this identifier to stable storage and enriched metadata, thereby granting the work an existence independent of immediate recognition while establishing temporal priority in the knowledge commons. Misapprehension here proves common yet costly: many anticipate prestige from mere deposition, overlooking that this layer concerns persistence alone, an infrastructural precondition that renders subsequent strata viable yet confers no hierarchical distinction whatsoever. The scholar who internalises this distinction avoids frustration, recognising instead that ontological existence forms the indispensable base upon which identity stabilisation, visibility cultivation and reputational filtration may later be erected, each step demanding its own translational competencies and strategic recalibrations. Such comprehension reframes academic labour as systemic architecture, wherein the producer must align dissemination tactics with the distinct affordances of every level to construct a resilient corpus capable of traversing unstable informational environments without semantic erosion or attributive fragmentation.