Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
I don&#x27;t see how this could ever work, and non-scientists seem to often dramatically underestimate the amount of work it would be to replicate every published paper.<p>This of course depends a lot on the specific field, but it can easily be months of effort to replicate a paper. You save some time compared to the original as you don&#x27;t have to repeat the dead ends and you might receive some samples and can skip parts of the preparation that way. But properly replicating a paper will still be a lot of effort, especially when there are any issues and it doesn&#x27;t work on the first try. Then you have to troubleshoot your experiments and make sure that no mistakes were made. That can add a lot of time to the process.<p>This is also all work that doesn&#x27;t benefit the scientists replicating the paper. It only costs them money and time.<p>If someone cares enough about the work to build on it, they will replicate it anyway. And in that case they have a good incentive to spend the effort. If that works this will indirectly support the original paper even if the following papers don&#x27;t specifically replicate the original results. Though this part is much more problematic if the following experiments fail, then this will likely remain entirely unpublished. But the solution here unfortunately isn&#x27;t as simple as just publishing negative results, it take far more work to create a solid negative result than just trying the experiments and abandoning them if they&#x27;re not promising.