As with everything to do with smart people it is all about incentives. If you create a system where accuracy of results don’t matter and where you must publish or die then don’t be surprised if what you get are lots of crap publications with dubious or false results. Hoping for a different outcome without changing the incentives is fantasy thinking.
The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.
Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else - the "squeezing on the balloon" effect.
The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude "most publications = funding" model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant winners until we have used up all the funding available.
The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the current grant winners.
No I am not. It gets brought up every so often as the most rational approach, but those who have climbed the greasy pole of the current system, and hence control it, are none to keen to change.
The usual argument against a lottery is it does not reward the best scientists and will give grants to third rate hacks. This is true, but it can be solved by having different lotteries with different thresholds. Publish one paper in the Journal of Useless & Pointless Results and you go into Pool A where you might have a 0.1% of getting a grant. Publish 20 articles in Nature and Science and you go into Pool H where you have a 75% chance. We would just need to be careful that we are not recreating the same perverse incentives that the current system encourages, but this is not insurmountable.
The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.
Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else - the "squeezing on the balloon" effect.
The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude "most publications = funding" model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant winners until we have used up all the funding available.
The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the current grant winners.