[sgt101]

>biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.

This is no excuse, and allowing it to be an excuse is at the root of why things are going so wrong in Science. If your name is on the paper you 100% must own every word.

There should be some agreed sanctions for this kind of thing. I would recommend that if any paper is withdrawn all the authors should be prohibited from receiving government funding for 3 years, and they should be banned from publication & citation for 5 years.

I am thinking this would change the culture quite radically.

[ossicones]

If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.

In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.

The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.

[sgt101]

I think that you have to trust your collaborators, but that trust is being given far too easily at the moment because there is no consequence of it being betrayed.

In the old days a single dodgy paper meant ostracism. Literally - no meeting invites, no more grants, no promotion, no moves to another department. Nothing. You sat where you were in shame until you retired. You had to do a lot of teaching and admin as well.

I do not think that this is the case now, and folks know it and are acting that way.