Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
I don'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.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'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'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.This is also all work that doesn't benefit the scientists replicating the paper. It only costs them money and time.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'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 Though this part is much more problematic if the following experiments fail, then this will likely remain entirely unpublished.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'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're not promising.