From my perspective as a former academic there is no simple solution here. We have created a system where the pressure to publish first and ask questions later is totally overwhelming. This is a cancer within science that will ultimately destroy public support for funding scientific research.<p>If we are going to solve this problem we need to reduce the pressure on scientists to publish at all costs. This publish-or-die thinking is driven by the extreme competition for grants and tenure tracked positions. Given I think it unlikely that the amount of money available for research is going to quadruple anytime soon (this is about the amount of money we would need to put into the system to get rid of the publish-at-all-costs mentality) what can be done?<p>1. Break the link between publication and grant funding. We could move to a system where once you had proved that you could do research (say published  a few papers) and could come up with a viable research idea that was doable assessed by a simple grant proposal, then you go into a pool and the grants allocated by lottery. We should aim to have 50% to 75% of all scientists in this pool. We then fund as many grants as we can given the money available.<p>2. Spend some of the current research money on long-term fellowships (say 10 years) that are awarded in the same lottery way as grants.<p>3. Drastically reduce PhD student training to get supply and demand back into line. e.g. make it such that a supervisor can not supervise more than  one student at a time.