Smeesters/Erasmus 2014 — "computer crash" defense in misconduct case

In 2012, Erasmus University concluded it had no confidence in the scientific integrity of social psychologist Dirk Smeesters' published work. The 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 case is the cleanest documented example of "my data is lost" as an unfalsifiable defense in a research-misconduct proceeding. The investigation could not test the lost-data claim because the architecture under which the data had been stored did not produce attestable artifacts at the time of deposit. The defense was successful only in the limited sense that no specific data-fabrication finding could be made — but the seven-paper misconduct ruling stood on the indirect evidence available.

Under content-addressed deposit at the point of collection (the architectural fix C-0034 calls for), the same defense becomes testable. Hashes and signatures resolve, or they do not. The investigation has a clean evidentiary path that the Smeesters case did not.

The case is empirical input for both C-0034 (forensic implications of architectural choice) and the broader §8 verification argument.