[DiogenesKynikos]

There's no "consumer" who "buys" research into whether protons decay. That's basic research that will only occur if funded by national agencies that are not motivated by return on investment.

As for commercial research, similar problems of fraud exist as in academic research. Instead of prestige, the motivations are things like bonuses and promotions.

Academics actually care a great deal about fraud, funding agencies hate fraud and punish it, journals hate fraud - everyone dislikes it. Competing labs have every incentive to catch fraud conducted by their rivals. The idea that academia is rife with fraud and that nobody cares is just not true.

There will always be a certain level of fraud not just in research, but in every economic sector, every intellectual pursuit, and every sport, commercial or not. There's no system that will perfectly eliminate it, but because of its empiricism and openness, science is fairly good at correcting itself over time.

[mike_hearn]

Physics gets large amounts of commercial investment. Quantum computers have been invested in heavily by the private sector for years. The defense world invests in laser research, etc. Plenty of examples out there. You can always find a topic you personally feel is super important even though it has no practical applications today, but such arguments are unfalsifiable. I can just as easily argue [more] proton decay research doesn't matter [yet] and you can't prove I'm wrong, so it's not worth going there.

The same problems exist but not on the same scale. If your employer discovers you committed fraud to get a promotion you will certainly be fired and quite probably be taken to court by their legal department. If the fraud is at the level of the company they risk destruction and imprisonment by the government. It's not like in academia where they'll sit on it for years and then, maybe, request a little notice to be put on the paper's web page - all without the government even noticing let alone caring. The huge difference in consequences yields different risk/reward ratios and that's reflected in how often these problems are found.

> Academics actually care a great deal about fraud, funding agencies hate fraud and punish it, journals hate fraud - everyone dislikes it.

Do they? How is the co-author of this paper still employed if funding agencies punish it? Where are the university funded research-police departments? Why do we keep hearing cases like this Alzheimer's one and why are there never any announcements by Vice Chancellors about doubling investment into fraud investigations as a consequence? Why is a research audit not something that these fraudsters fear? How is it the case that publishers discover after the fact that dozens of their journals have been completely compromised by paper mills, instead of it being discovered via some more active process before publication occurs?

> science is fairly good at correcting itself over time

Absolutely not. If science was good at self correcting it wouldn't take nearly two decades for someone to notice that a widely cited paper was forged, and the people who notice these things wouldn't need to be anonymous. But they do. Look at the Gino case. She launched a massively well funded lawsuit against the people claiming she engaged in fraud. That's the exact opposite of self correction.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> Physics gets large amounts of commercial investment.

Almost all funding for basic research, including for physics, comes from governments. There are a few niche areas of basic research, like quantum computing, that also attract commercial investment, and there is plenty of applied research, but governments are almost the only game in town for basic research.

I think fraud is actually a much larger problem in commercial research, because the incentives to cheat are much stronger. There's real money at play. Theranos was a massive fraud. There's plenty of fraud and misconduct in the pharma industry. And when it comes to academia, the fields that have the most commercial potential (like biomedical research) have the worst problems with fraud.

> How is the co-author of this paper still employed if funding agencies punish it?

Is the co-author guilty of fraud?

> Where are the university funded research-police departments?

It's the funding agencies, the journals and other academics that are most involved in finding fraud.

> Why do we keep hearing cases like this Alzheimer's one

Because there's a huge volume of research, and some small percentage of it will be fraudulent.

> why are there never any announcements by Vice Chancellors about doubling investment into fraud investigations as a consequence?

That might be a bad allocation of resources. If fraud is a rare phenomenon and isn't severely impacting a field, then the current level of investigations might be sufficient. Add to that the fact that the way most of these frauds are uncovered is by competing researchers.