Author mentions difficulty of reproducing research as one of the issues in passing. There was a recent Nature special edition on the subject:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;reproducibility-1.17552" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;reproducibility-1.17552</a><p>I believe this is the <i>primary</i> issue and the cause is from one of two causes:<p>1) secret sauce in research -- details are lacking because there is a push to commercialize things that come out of academia<p>2) insufficient experimental design -- small sample size, poor controls, etc.<p>I would like to see an open publication that as a part of publication the result must be reproduced in a separate independent lab or two. This would almost double the required funding (maybe less because you eliminate false starts). Maybe just a few institutions could handle many reproductions.<p>There is a bit of a self-healing aspect in that the non-reproducible and non-interesting&#x2F;advancing studies just get dropped on the floor. However, it would lend a lot of credibility to a journal that required an independent research confirmation.