Content addressing makes "my data is lost" a testable rather than unfalsifiable defense

The architectural shift from trust-based to verification-based compliance also eliminates a category of unfalsifiable defense against misconduct allegations.

In 2012, Erasmus University concluded it had no confidence in the scientific integrity of social psychologist Dirk Smeesters' published work, and its 2014 final report formally found misconduct across seven papers. When asked to produce raw data supporting his published results, Smeesters responded that his home computer had crashed and that selectively discarding data was nothing out of the ordinary in his field and his department (S-0115).

The "my data is lost" defense is credible only in an architecture that cannot distinguish lost data from data that never existed in the form reported. Under content-addressed deposit at the point of collection, the hashes and signatures either resolve against the original attestation or they do not. Data loss becomes a testable claim rather than an unfalsifiable one.

The reckless-disregard theory developed in §5.4 (C-0025) applies with particular force to institutions in which this category of defense is still structurally available, because the absence of verification infrastructure is precisely what makes the defense possible. An institution that has deployed Tier 3 architecture and the integrity-attestation layer at deposit can establish, post hoc, whether claimed data ever existed in the form reported. An institution operating on Tier 0 architecture cannot.

The architectural reading: integrity attestation at deposit is not just preservation infrastructure. It is forensic infrastructure, and it changes the evidentiary landscape under which research-misconduct cases are litigated.