Cross-Venue Reframe (rt-venue-reframe)

rt-journal-match answers which venue next. This answers the question that immediately follows and that nothing else in the repository covers: what actually has to change in the paper.

Authors do this after almost every rejection, and they do it badly — usually by swapping the journal name in the cover letter and resubmitting. A real reframe is a diff across five layers, and both endpoints are already documented in this repo: the source venue's pack and the target venue's pack.

When to trigger

• A paper was rejected at venue A and the next rung is venue B.
• The author is choosing between two live targets and wants to know the cost of each.
• An editor or referee said "this reads like a paper".
• A paper written for an international venue is being re-aimed at a Chinese venue, or the reverse — the largest reframe distance in this repository.

Inputs

1. From venue and to venue — as venue_ids in venue-index.tsv. If the author only names a rejection, take the next rung from ladder.tsv — filter to same_discipline = yes and prefer high mentions, then sanity-check against rt-journal-match.
2. The manuscript — at minimum the title, abstract, intro, and the main table.
3. The rejection signal, if any — desk reject, referee reject, or "not a fit".

Method — diff five layers, in this order

Read the to venue's fit/topic-selection and writing-style skills first; read the from venue's only to identify what the paper currently optimizes for. Where a venue is a breadth-bundle profile, its single SKILL.md (profile_path) carries the same five layers in condensed form.

Then rank the diff by cost × necessity: a reframe that needs a new identification strategy is a different paper, and the honest answer may be "this is not a reframe, pick a different rung."

Hard rules

1. Read both packs. Never reframe from memory of a venue's reputation.
2. All volatile facts (length, format, fees, data policy) come from the to-venue's resources/official-source-map.md at reframe time.
3. Defer fit judgement to the to-venue's own topic-selection skill — this skill sequences and diffs, it does not overrule the venue's pack.
4. Say when a reframe is not worth it. If layer 1 or 3 requires new evidence the author cannot produce, state that plainly and route back to rt-journal-match for a different rung. Framing cannot rescue an identification problem.
5. Preserve the paper's honesty. Reframing changes emphasis, structure and claim scope — never the findings, magnitudes, or caveats. If a target venue's bar seems to require overstating a result, that is a signal the venue is wrong, not the result.

Output format

【From → To】venue A → venue B  (ladder evidence: n mentions | manual)
【Distance】small / moderate / different-paper — one line of why
【1 Contribution claim】before → after (the new "why it matters" sentence)
【2 Introduction arc】move / cut / add, in order
【3 Evidence bar】missing-and-required · now-dead-weight
【4 House style】length · abstract · exhibits · citations   (source-map read: <date>)
【5 Policy】data-and-code deltas
【Cost-ranked plan】1..n, each with an effort estimate
【Do not do this reframe if】the condition that makes it futile

Anti-patterns

• Rewriting only the introduction. Layer 1 usually implies layer 3, and a paper whose claim moved but whose evidence did not gets desk-rejected faster than the original.
• Reframing "upward" after a referee reject without addressing the binding objection — route through the from-venue's *-robustness skill first.
• Treating a Chinese ↔ English move as a translation task. The contribution grammar (制度背景, 边际贡献, policy salience vs. general-interest novelty) differs, and both packs document their own.
• Quoting the target's page cap or fee from memory instead of the source map.

Next: rt-desk-reject-risk to score the reframed draft against the new venue, then rt-submission-readiness for the mechanical bar.