In Should you trust your collaborators? Sebastien Paquet shows deep concern for ineptitude if not malfeasance demonstrated among major 'players' in the institutionalized knowledge-making business. I share his concern. His excerpts and concern are quoted below. My added comments are at the bottom.

In some ways, the pivotal figure in the research misconduct case at Bell Labs was not Dr. J. Hendrik Schön, the scientist fired last month for fabricating and manipulating data, but Dr. Bertram Batlogg, the man who hired him in 1998.

An investigatory panel cleared Dr. Batlogg, and all other co-authors, of knowledge of the deception. But without Dr. Batlogg's imprimatur, the remarkable findings in superconductivity and organic electronics, now discredited, would have been scrutinized more skeptically sooner.

"You have to trust your collaborators or you're not a collaborator. On the other hand, collaborations occur when you sit and argue over the data. Every collaborator has a responsibility that they're comfortable with what's said in the papers."

I'm not sure where to start with this. How about something to the effect that "In the a knowledge-making community, collaborative action does not imply absolute partitioning of the knowledge construction process [where absolute partitioning would allow cheating or incompetence in one partition of the community's activity and honest and competent and honest dealing in the others]. Partial partitioning implies instead that, while there may be delegation of first responsibility for the competent completion and truthful reporting of each subprocess, each collaborator has,nonetheless, significant involvement in each subprocess."

There are probably multiple possible justifications for this partial partitioning, three occur to me right off: a) significant involvement in all steps maintains the totipotential status of each participant; b) unlike members of a top-down organization where the CEO or General takes 'full responsibility' and members only being responsible for their isolated piece, I see collaborators freely associating and each taking a shared responsibility for the total product and all subprocesses [this point may follow, upon my further reflection, from the prior point]; and c) a paraphrase[??] 'the price of freedom is vigilance'. [Perhaps all of this is implied in "Every collaborator has a responsibility [to make sure] that they're comfortable with [the quality and truthfulness of the final product].