Obviously the members of development team can assign ouselves any access privileges to any content of any author. But they should use it only in emergency situations if absolutely necessary for any reason, such as violation of copyright or some others serious problems.
In all other cases the content created by the author is owned by the author unless she/he explicitly gave the right to edit to somebody else. But that is not how this issue is handled in LingQ.
You can find some interesting discussion related to the same topics that we have here: