[cgiles]

Completely agreed on all counts.

By "reform from within", I mainly meant the NIH, NSF, big funders, etc, need to pay more than lip service to this before Congress gets involved. Although there are people who have built careers on irreproducibility itself. Ioannidis for example. But that requires a lot of dedication and tends to piss a lot of people off.

Another counterintuitive possibility is that scientific publication could go more of the PLoS route and actually lower standards for initial publication -- and then rely more heavily on post-publication peer review. Then irreproducible papers would get publicly "downvoted". And conversely, papers that didn't seem useful enough at the time to make it into Nature, but turned out to be pathbreaking, would get the recognition they deserve.

Further incentives for publishing as much raw data as possible and, where applicable, code, would help too. The NIH has done a good job here. They require a lot of high-throughput datasets to be made available raw if they were collected with NIH funding. They provide hosting for this. It means people can go back and re-analyze it, and you don't have to trust the authors' analyses.