> You're missing the point of scientific publication. The entire point of publication is so others can reproduce your work. Speed doesn't work if you need a billion data points taken over 20 years to prove a long term issue.
In theory, that's the point. In practice, no journals ever publish replications, so nobody wastes their time reproducing others' work when they could be working on something publishable or their next grant proposal.
>In practice, no journals ever publish replications, so nobody wastes their time reproducing others' work when they could be working on something publishable or their next grant proposal.
Uh, this is exactly how Science works. It's not worth publishing the exact same results of the exact same experiment by multiple people. That only adds noise to the discussion.
If I arrive to the same conclusion after running the experiment again, then there is little benefit to anyone if I do a full writeup and publish it. On the other hand, if I am unable to arrive to the same results, there is a tremendous value in publishing my findings. Was the original study flawed? Were my own methods? That's what peer review and publishing results help determine.
Not publishing positive replications is just as bad a problem as not publishing negative original results. We have things like BigTable and Hadoop now; if 100 laboratories repeat an experiment and publish their results, that just means we can raise our confidence in the result by the sum of their likelihood ratios.
I remember seeing an article suggesting that the incentives related to publication (specifically in medicine) set us up for conditions where a majority of published results are wrong, and we have no way of knowing it:
Effectively requiring a positive result for publication means two phenomena can be the subject of multiple studies, with the one fluke that finds correlation being the one that gets published. At that point, we only get corrected if someone actually attempts to replicate the result, but replication effort may well be seen as a waste of resources.
In theory, that's the point. In practice, no journals ever publish replications, so nobody wastes their time reproducing others' work when they could be working on something publishable or their next grant proposal.