To what extent is science a strong-link problem?
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The only problem that I can see from where I stand is that the machinary is consistently being disincentivized to produce good science. PhDs want to finish their research at any cost possible, Professionals are constantly under the publish or perish dilemma, and there is an increasing difficulty in getting enough reviewers to go through a manuscript with desired rigor. Not sure what'll fix it though. Perhaps efforts to promote good science as opposed to a great one like accepting publications for failed attempts (michaelson morley style), replication results of earlier works, or the general acceptance of the fact that research is difficult and one can not be expected to pull the figurative rabbit out of one's hat every couple of months?
Too often we try to solve social problems by "adding" something, whether it be adding an incentive or adding a program. I think to really solve the problem of publish or perish mentality, we first need to understand the root cause or causes of this mentality, then work to remove them. What I'm seeing here is humans being shepherded by enormous economic and social pressure to engage in selfish behavior for survival and/or social acceptance. Adding an incentive or a program therefore ultimately does not work because it does nothing about the fact that the humans are still largely enslaved by the aforementioned pressure. So, we must remove the pressure. Remove the pressure, remove the selfish behavior. But how to remove the pressure?
Since this is simple to answer (remove all requirements to publish frequently, and hope that a lot of journals die naturally after that), the real question is: how do we distribute funding to scientists without forcing them to frequently show their work?
I could imagine a world where every scientist (starting from Ph.D student onwards) is evaluated only e.g. on the basis of a biyearly dissertation-style report, which includes all (positive and negative) results, all data/metadata/code/analysis. Rapid communication of interesting results can still happen at conferences and the remaining journals.
But then who reads, reviews and ranks all this work? Who gets positions and funding?
Today, the Year Book is little more than a glossy fundraising document.
You can view the reports over the years: https://carnegiescience.edu/about/history/publications/carne...
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...
discussed here last year:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0312018
which I think is a good paper from the viewpoint of "correctness" but on another level isn't a normal research paper as it isn't about one project. A lot of weird stuff goes on like this in academic publishing. When I was studying physics I got invited to present at a CS conference on Java in academic computing and didn't really understand the opportunity I would have had to have gotten a paper published pretty easily based on my attendance (e.g. really connections, I knew people who knew Geoff Fox who was organizing it)
My claim is that Molbio folks see the world like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
where you replace "Manhattan" with "Molecular Biology" so something in another field is going to have to really stand out (be outrageous) otherwise the reviewer will say "This isn't important enough for Science, maybe they should consider submitting the paper to Physical Review Letters instead.”