I'm not sure I see the causal relationship here. Why does increased competition mean that people are not publishing? I think the problem is that the metrics wh

I'm not sure I see the causal relationship here. Why does increased competition mean that people are not publishing? I think the problem is that the metrics which academics are competing to maximize are poor. If your metric is "How much interesting science has this person published?" you're going to get very different results from "How much accurate science has this person published?" Reducing competition doesn't change which question is being asked, it just reduces the importance of any metric at all. It seems likely to me that removing competition would give no incentive to publish anything measurable at all; after all, why publish if your career isn't connected to it? Obviously some would publish for intrinsic reasons, and it's possible that stress levels due to competition are leading to shoddy work, but none of this amounts to an argument that less competition would lead to people publishing negative results.