Does content addressing change the evidentiary status of "my data is lost" misconduct claims?

A subsidiary question under Q-0005. §8.2 raises a forensic dimension that the architectural argument carries beyond preservation and into research-misconduct adjudication.

The answer is C-0034. In 2012, Erasmus University concluded it had no confidence in the scientific integrity of social psychologist Dirk Smeesters' published work; its 2014 report found misconduct across seven papers. When asked to produce raw data, Smeesters responded that his home computer had crashed and that selectively discarding data was nothing out of the ordinary in his field.

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 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. 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.