The enforcement mechanism behind all this would require some contract by signatory participating universities that would include withdrawal of review and publishing privileges in the event of *ahem* impropriety. You could extend the memberships on a university-department affiliation basis, so that universities are then competing across two dimensions--ethics AND quality--with the best candidates presumably preferring some combination where the two qualities are strongly represented. (Maybe I'm Polyanna-ish there?)
I agree, but the problem is really how the term
quality is defined. Right now, it means, "the candidate with the most citations and publications in high-impact journals." Sociology being what it is, people buy into this idea.
Some do so because getting or keeping a job depends on it. Others have been drinking too much Kool-Aid. Etc.
Personally, I've opted to follow a path that JonLaw used to describe by saying, "the only way to win is not to play the game." I run a tiny operation, but the work is meaningful to me and people who work with or for me. We write good publications that get meaningful citations (i.e. no citation buddies). I mix risky and plain-vanilla stuff, which lets me tell potential funders and collaborators that a) something useful is highly likely to come from the work, and b) there is also a possibility for something really cool.
This sounds like an obvious recipe, but you'd be surprised. Our society is so terrified of taking an honest risk, we call ideas like Uber and Twitter "innovative."
Or take "high risk" R21 grants at NIH. R21s are small exploratory grants supposedly aimed at letting a person without much preliminary data to explore a risky, but potentially very cool idea. The NIH will tell you with a straight face that reviewers prefer applications with lots of preliminary data (see
comments here for example.
This attitude undermines the entire purpose of the program. This is only one example, but it does help show why US research funding fosters incremental studies.
Okay, maybe I sound too cranky here. Believe me, I'm not arguing against non-risky studies. We need them. But we also need to let people be free to use their imaginations to test off-the-wall ideas. To do that, they need time: time to focus on a thorny problem, time during which they are not expected to publish, and time to get stuff wrong on the way to getting it right (or not). This doesn't happen at universities right now.
Also, I'm definitely not the only person who thinks this way. See
this article. Or this one in
Nature claiming that scientific innovation is being smothered by a culture of conformity. I see this as being ... about removing the capitalist incentives behind publishing garbage research and nullifying some of the perverse incentive systems that have crept into *what should be* a system built on the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
Oh, amen.
