Four words: Academic fraud is fraud. If you accept an NIH grant to conduct a rigorous study and falsify your data, then you have defrauded the federal governmen

Four words: Academic fraud is fraud. If you accept an NIH grant to conduct a rigorous study and falsify your data, then you have defrauded the federal government. If you are a supervisor, a department head or an administrator and you turn a blind eye to implausible results and indefensible practices, then you are complicit in fraud. If your journal claims to be rigorously peer-reviewed but your reviewers are rubber-stamping papers that they haven't read, then the institutions that buy very expensive subscriptions are being defrauded. Only in academia is fraud treated as a faux-pas rather than a crime. We have accepted a status quo in which academics and academic institutions play by a different set of rules to the rest of society. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted and patients are suffering real harm. Academic independence is valuable and should be protected, but independence does not mean impunity.