I think the current system is just measuring entirely the wrong thing. Yes, fewer papers would be published. But today's goal is "publish papers" not "learn and

I think the current system is just measuring entirely the wrong thing. Yes, fewer papers would be published. But today's goal is "publish papers" not "learn and disseminate truly useful and novel things", and while this doesn't solve it entirely, it pushes incentives further away from "publish whatever pure crap you can get away with." You get what you measure -> sometimes you need to change what/how you measure. > If someone cares enough about the work to build on it, they will replicate it anyway. That's duplicative at the "oh maybe this will be useful to me" stage, with N different people trying to replicate. And with replication not a first-class part of the system, the effort of replication (e_R) is high. For appealing things, N is probably > 2. So N X e_R total effort. If you move the burden at the "replicate to publish" stage, you can fix the number of replicas needed so N=2 (or whatever) and you incentive the orginal researchers to make e_R lower (which will improve the quality of their research even before the submit-for-publication stage). I've been in the system, I spent a year or two chasing the tail of rewrites, submissions, etc, for something that was detectable as low-effect-size in the first place but I was told would still be publishable. I found out as part of that that it would only sometimes yield a good p-value! And everything in the system incentivized me to hide that for as long as possible, instead of incentivizing me to look for something else or make it easy for others to replicate and judge for themselves. Hell, do something like "give undergrads the opportunity to earn Master's on top of their BSes, say, by replicating (or blowing holes in) other people's submissions." I would've eaten up an opportunity like that to go really really deep* in some specialized area in exchange for a masters degree in a less-structured way than "just take a bunch more courses."