[freework]

In my opinion, the solution to all of this is to get rid of the whitepaper system all together.

From now on, all scientists who want to publish science, they publish their work in the form of a video. They film themselves doing the science and then put that video on YouTube, or maybe some science specific version of youtube. Other people can then watch the video and determine for themselves if the science is valid or not.

Its much harder to fake science if there is a video involved. Its too easy to make fake science if all you have to do you "prove" it is write some words.

[bluenose69]

It takes of order 6 months to do the work described in a single paper. Even if we imagine someone watching the videos at double speed, it would take 3 months per paper. And that's for an expert who can understand the material.

Folks don't have the time to read the literature thoroughly as it is. That's one of the reasons the junk gets published. So this is not practical.

Plus, imagine reporting to your funding agency, Dean, or boss, that all you accomplished this year was to watch a few videos. No new work of your own. I guess you would make a video of you watching a video. And then someone would watch a video of you watching a video ...

[dchftcs]

My guess is that more than half of the world's scientific resources are spent on projects in bad faith, so I'm actually ok with legitimate scientists spending 100% more to justify their papers, if the extra work can be covered by the surplus resources saved by eliminating frauds. However, there are many reasons the proposed method is impractical.

[einpoklum]

In most theoretical/abstract pursuits, from math to comparative literature, "doing the science" means "writing the text of the paper" - and nothing else; shall I film myself doing that?

On second thought, maybe I could make a video of how I manage all of those dirty LaTeX tricks to squeeze my paper into less pages, at least there's some tangible payoff there...

[freework]

> "doing the science" means "writing the text of the paper"

The point is to show your work. You film yourself setting up the experiment to prove that you actually did the experiment. You also film yourself collecting the results, proving that you actually got the results you claim.

The only kind of science that consists of "just writing the paper" is math. Math will be exempt from this requirement. Fake math is not an epidemic

[yabbs]

Economics <cough>