[From the article “Go Forth and Replicate: On Creating Incentives for Repeat Studies” by Michael Schulson at the web magazine Undark]

“Suggested reasons for the [replication] crisis are many. Some researchers have blamed the scientific publishing culture itself …. But some stakeholders also point to a more concrete and obvious root cause: a lack of direct incentives to replicate other researchers’ work, including very little funding to do replications. This raises some key questions, including whether the federal government — the largest single funder of basic science in the world — ought to be doing more to encourage and underwrite basic replication research. At the moment, only token reforms have been undertaken in the U.S., but there are signs that novel programs are gestating elsewhere, including a European pilot program that could serve as a model for replication funding in other countries.”

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