I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose 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 I would recommend that if any paper is withdrawn all the authors should be prohibited from receiving government funding for 3 years, and they should be banned from publication & citation for 5 years.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.
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.
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.
Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.)
Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published.
So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard.
It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.
To the real brass tacks incentives: yeah, it's "someone is angry on the internet" vs, "I will have to deal with a discipline process with documentation and meetings and maybe depositions and adversarial lawyers. That's not my bag, I'm a scientist. There will be volatile young people and bad feelings communicated in person, plus gossip among my close coworkers. Also undesirable. If this becomes a repeated pattern, learners might start avoiding my lab, and deans/my superiors might start asking very awkward questions." Yeah, stacked against that, angry person on the internet is a weak incentive. Even if they're right.
And the snark does matter. Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions. So the contrast in styles draws lines of "us" vs "them." And it's natural to care more about the opinions and esteem of your in-group (who talk like you) than the out-group (who deride you).
Let's all remember what we are talking about here: every single one of us will know someone who will die several years early because of scientific fraud. It is reasonable to be angry as hell.
Indeed, we've seen how the polite approach is so hard to ignore/avoid that the adults in elite institutions solve problems before snarky folks wake up!
The first author 'undergrads' or 'med students' are not assembling the paper no way. For sure the last authors know what is going on.