The goal of this article is to extend the work of Voevodsky and Morel on the homotopy t-structure on the category of motivic complexes to the context of motives for logarithmic schemes. To do so, we prove an analogue of Morel’s connectivity theorem and show a purity statement for $({\mathbf {P}}^1, \infty )$ -local complexes of sheaves with log transfers. The homotopy t-structure on ${\operatorname {\mathbf {logDM}^{eff}}}(k)$ is proved to be compatible with Voevodsky’s t-structure; that is, we show that the comparison functor $R^{{\overline {\square }}}\omega ^*\colon {\operatorname {\mathbf {DM}^{eff}}}(k)\to {\operatorname {\mathbf {logDM}^{eff}}}(k)$ is t-exact. The heart of the homotopy t-structure on ${\operatorname {\mathbf {logDM}^{eff}}}(k)$ is the Grothendieck abelian category of strictly cube-invariant sheaves with log transfers: we use it to build a new version of the category of reciprocity sheaves in the style of Kahn-Saito-Yamazaki and Rülling.

We prove that for a topological operad $P$ the operad of oriented cubical singular chains, $C_{*}^{^{\text{ord}}}(P)$, and the operad of simplicial singular chains, ${{S}_{*}}(P)$, are weakly equivalent. As a consequence, $C_{*}^{^{\text{ord}}}(P;\,\mathbb{Q})$ is formal if and only if ${{S}_{*}}(P;\,\mathbb{Q})$ is formal, thus linking together some formality results which are spread out in the literature. The proof is based on an acyclic models theorem for monoidal functors. We give different variants of the acyclic models theorem and apply the contravariant case to study the cohomology theories for simplicial sets defined by $R$-simplicial differential graded algebras.