> If an engineer builds the worlds greatest new engine There is more to science than advanced product development. Conflating the two is wrong-headed. > but s

> If an engineer builds the worlds greatest new engine There is more to science than advanced product development. Conflating the two is wrong-headed. > but says "unfortunately it'll only run in my lab, no one else is competent enough to run it or build a copy" then what good is it to society? It's fantastically good to society. A company interested in monetizing the research could provide that researcher with a multi-year sabbatical to come to their company and turn is Research into a Product. Incidentally, that happens. It's also not unheard of for phd students to carry an adviser's idea forward toward application in the context of a permanent position at a relevant company. > almost nobody else can duplicate There's a difference between not being able to duplicate, and duplication being expensive. > and it is therefore impossible to determine the veracity of their claims Again, reproducibility should focus on the veracity of the claims, not the economics of reproducing them. Nothing is wrong with calling for better reproducibility. The problem is in expecting to get it for free, and assuming that it's always appropriate at every stage of research. Investment in reproducibility should be in proportion to the degree of trust the scientific community puts in the claim, and it is absolutely reasonable for that investment to grow over time. But, don't kid yourself, it's an investment. And society would have to be stupid to invest enormous amounts of money into ensuring every single scientific paper ever published is held to an extremely strong standard for reproducibility. > Isn't the onus on the researchers to focus experiments that are also reproducible by non-supergeniuses? If by "super genius" you mean "someone else who does research in the same or a closely related field", then Hell. No. The onus on the scientists is to focus on experiments that push science forward in service of mankind. Sometimes this means helping mega-corps figure out how to reliably reproduce your research without expert help and thereby increase profit by decreasing required investment. Sometimes this means focusing on discovery.