Is there no liability for the author? There are billions of dollars wasted in drug trials and research that can be tied to this fraud. Surely they can face some legal issues due to this?
Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big insurance policy. Is it a behavioral study without much risk... small insurance policy.
Is a a person in an institution found caught committing fraud, well now then all papers from that institution now have higher premiums.
Did you sign off on a peer reviewed paper that was fraud? Well now your premiums are going up also.
Insurance costs too high to publish? Well then keep doing research until the underwriters are satisfied that your work isn't fraud and adjust the premiums down.
It adds a direct near-term economic incentive to publish honestly and punishes those that abuse the system.
The insurance model does not really work when the cost of evaluating the risks far outweighs the expected risks.
The problem could be, that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance.
What type of research would that be? Just publish it online without insurance and everyone will treat it as it unverified and uninsured... separate from other research that is.
Once the risk of the publishing research has gone down (i.e. reputable peers approve, or the findings were replicated), the cost of the insurance goes down also.
if something is so costly to insure, there would be a reason and thus the system works.
The "organic" way this would happen is if there was a shift so that journals with insured research are far more valuable than uninsured research. Or perhaps if companies started suing researchers for negligence and fraud and recuperate costs if they used research that was later proved to be fraud.
In the literary world, anyone can publish a book, but a book from o'reilly caries with it a different level of authority and diligence then a self published book or blog post.
So the shift would have to be that your career can't advance without publishing a bonded and insured paper.
Science is largely about doing novel things and often being the first person in the world to try something. In order to understand the risks, you have to understand the actual research, as well as the personalities and personal lives of the people doing it.
Then there is the question of perverse incentives. Research fraud is not a random event but an intentional action by the people who take the insurance. If they manage to convince you to underwrite their research, they know that the consequences of getting caught will be less severe than without the insurance, making fraud more likely. Normally intentional fraud would not be covered by the policy, but here covering it would be the explicit purpose of the insurance.
The research might be novel, but the procedures for research and publication are very similar. So insurance companies would just make sure that you followed a protocol which minimizes their risk.
perverse incentives are taken into account by insurance. Insuring someone is always a adversarial back and forth to determine if they are being truthful or not. Which is why Life insurance companies require a physical. They don't just have you self report and then accept it as fact.
Industry professionals like lawyers and doctors carry malpractice insurance. A lawyer can still commit fraud. Insurance isn't a black and white thing. It is a sliding scale that ties risk to a monetary value.
Its not rocket science. Just actuarial science. ;)
This is wrong.
Some time ago, I completed the checklists for publishing a paper in a somewhat prestigious multidisciplinary journal. Large parts of the lists were about complying with various best practices and formal requirements in different fields. I often didn't even understand the questions outside my field. And the questions nominally within my field were often category errors. They assumed a mode of doing research that was far from universal. Overall, the process was more frustrating than (let's say) applying for a US visa.
Yes there is novel research that has never been done before? So what? That doesn't change if you can get insurance or not. Thats a failed argument from the beginning.
Anyways you don't seem to be having a discussion in earnest and instead you seem to be intentionally disregarding large pieces of the above arguments and trying to shoehorn in your idea that if there is unique research being done that it means that it is impossible to tell the risk of anything. Kinda silly.
Additionally, even if we assume that the insurance model is a good idea, it should be tied to individual researchers, not universities. The entire model of university research is based on loose networks of independent professionals nominally employed by various organizations. Universities don't do research, they don't own or control the projects, and they don't have the expertise to evaluate research. They are just teaching / administrative organizations that provide services in exchange for grant overheads.
Absolutely not. Underwriters are smart. They use other variables and methods for determining risk. They don't need to directly recreate and peer review the research themselves.
But if a health care professional does the same thing, and does something negligent, then they are usually liable. They are professionals and are held to a different standard. Similarly, that's why lawyers keep writing: this is not legal advice and you are not my client.
Perhaps a professional in science should have higher standards. Obviously they shouldn't be sued for being wrong - that would destroy science, disregard the scientific method's means to address inaccuracy, and go against science's nature as the means to develop new knowledge. But intentionally deceiving people perhaps should be illegal and/or create liability: When you publish something, people depend on its fundamental honesty and will act on it.
1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees
2) put them on a public “do not publish” list permanently banning them from being named on any paper in a journal
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, the ORI was set up in the 1970s after Congress became concerned at widespread reports of scientific fraud. It clearly didn't work, but hangs around regardless.
It's ultimately a culture problem. Until academics have the same level of respect as ordinary corporate employees, you're going to get judges and juries who let them off scott free.
I wrote a blog post on how to make this easier, including a new criminal statute specifically tailored for scientific fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672599