Within the academic community, many people do important research in things like medicine, technology, etc that require a lot of money up-front but can pay back very well/ do a lot of good in the long term.
However, a general issue with research is that there is small monetary incentive to reproduce research. This is a huge issue because it undermines one of the axioms of why science is so important: repeatability.
For example, in 2022, a fundamental study for the theory of where Alzheimer's comes from (from 16 years prior) was found to have been forged. Prior to awareness of the forgery, the FDA approved a drug that, based on this research, should significantly decrease intensity or even completely cure Alzheimer’s. In that same fiscal year, the NIH even spent $1.6 billion on research that mentions the results of the study, representing about half of overall Alzheimer’s funding (see the article attached).
Therefore, I propose that money ought to be raised to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen again by incentivizing academics to repeat studies.
Comment below additional events similar to the Alzheimer’s one below or any criticisms to this point
I'm an early career academic (accounting) and this was a big discussion in my phd program.
As a phd student, we completed multiple replications as an exercise in learning the research process. It is exhausting work, in part because authors often don't explain their methodology in sufficient detail to complete an exact replication. Best we could hope for was similar sample/descriptives/coefficients on main tests after following their process as best we could.
Another issue is that in many cases, the data used is proprietary and cannot be shared due to a data license agreement.
As you allude to, the main problem is that there is no real incentive for active researchers to work on replications, because generally journals do not usually publish replications (and of course, publish or perish!). You do occasionally see papers that are published which point out a major flaw in a published article, but these are rare and controversial (why make an enemy?).
I know there have been some studies that basically show that a very large (50%?) percentage of papers (I think in econ/finance/accounting) cannot be replicated, which is obviously concerning, and points to the scope of the problem.
I think the most successful work that could be done in this area is lobbying journals to: