Academic publishing is a conversation between academics. No one paper is truly authoritative and only with time will the highly cited well regarded contribution

Academic publishing is a conversation between academics. No one paper is truly authoritative and only with time will the highly cited well regarded contributions make themselves known within the academic community (and eventually outside of it too). The time horizon between publication and "impact" for most academic work is usually (or should be) in the range of 10-20years. In the rush for funding and "impact" university PR machines (and scientists too) are forced to make flashy statements about the latest new sensational, tenuous at best implications of their findings. Boring, rigorous, incremental work has no place in a media driven funding cycle. This is a real problem and one we need to think about how to resolve. Having said that, scientists are not perfect either. As an author, problems of honesty and reproducibility in science trouble me greatly. That's why on our recent papers (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/qjump/pubs/2015-nsdi-qjump.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/qjump/pubs/2015-n... and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/musketeer/pubs/2015-eurosys-musketeer.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/musketeer/pubs/20...) my coauthors and I have gone out of our way to make the original unprocessed data sets and detailed experimental descriptions easily available. If you take a look inside of our papers, you'll find that all of the substantial figures in the papers are clickable giving direct access to original datasets on our websites. Although not perfect, this is a start down the road of more easily testable and reproducible work. To our great surprise, only a few weeks after publication we've already got requests from people trying to reproduce the results in different environments. This suggests to me that this kind of approach both can work, and really should become the minimum standard in academic publishing.