| > 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. |