Comment Re:Troublemakers? (Score 1) 24
Perhaps a solution lies in penalising the institution of the authors of a paper that proves seriously flawed. This might incentivise faculties to encourage their PhD students to review proposed articles before publication and reward them for spotting mistakes, whose discovery would thus be avoiding the institution being fined for submitting naff data.
That's a brilliant idea. It's the institutions that mandate "publish or perish", and yet the responsibility for reviews, and any fallout from fabrication is entirely on the publishers. Institutions therefore have little concern for how their employers scam the system by publishing garbage. By scoring the institutions that employ the authors based on the integrity, as well as the quantity of their scholarly output, responsibility for quality becomes shared by all involved. It becomes an ecosystem in which every member shares the burden of quality control. These dual integrity and quantity scores would also provide a valuable metric for ranking institutions.