At this point, I feel bleak at the prospect of typing them out again. The problems with overpublication, ‘publish or perish’ culture, abusive lab environments, analytical flexibility, p-hacking, clinical trial registration games, grant front-running, intellectual capture, nonsense journals, fake journals, peer review manipulation, moral entrepreneurship, etc. precede the present discussions of paper mills and active falsification/fabrication cases…
I have tried at least four times in my memory to write out and codify how I would start an institute to combat these problems. Specifically, a formal organization under a 501c3 structure designed to address the problem.
In Germany we have the IQWIQ, an independent Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care who examines the benefits and harms of medical interventions for patients. But they don’t care about all the medical nonsense studies around. And without PubPeer we wouldn’t even know the nonsense…