Salary caps? So the best people go into the private sector where they can actually get paid?

Agree, I don't think salary caps have much to do with the poor alignment of incentives under discussion here.

Don't think $90k. Think $300k. There are plenty of top people glad to be academics for $150-$200k, and beyond that, you don't get an increase in quality. On the other hand, you avoid a lot of problems with misaligned incentives at the top.

> * Public access to research results, methods, and data, with some exceptions (such as PII)

You mentioned PII, so I'm assuming some familiarity with the health field. I'm curious about your thoughts on the position that one should not be required to immediately publicize their data, because there needs to be an expectation that a researcher can translate the capital (both time and money) they expend to acquire quality data into academic and institutional capital (in the form of research output, i.e. papers). The fear being, there might be insufficient motivation to conduct large data collection-oriented studies due to another researcher beating the data collector to the punch in terms of publishing certain findings.

My opinion is that it'd be better to handle that from the other side: incentive structures. If I generate a useful data set, I should get the equivalent of citations/publication/career credits for any work from that dataset. Enabling science is just as important as new results.

But I don't care much, so long as it gets published within a sensible timeframe.

At the very least it seems like it would be fraud not to include the original collector of the data as a co-author on the analysis paper.

I know at least one professor where one person generated the data. Another person cleaned the data. The professor got her faculty position by taking the cleaned data, running a regression on it, and publishing the first result. The original research team could have done the work in 15 minutes, but wanted to hold off on publication.

It got a ton of citations and press for her.

The research was at MIT. I won't mention where she's a professor, out of interests of privacy. I know several similar cases at MIT too.

But if it was fraud, what would one do about it? Screaming about this sort of thing kills everyone's careers, and embarrasses the institution the research was done at. It's no good for anyone involved. People move on. The whole system incentivizes this sort of fraud, and faculty positions are hypercompetitive, so people follow those incentive structures to be successful.

> Federally-funded universities can't use NDAs or non-disparage agreements

Many companies are only willing to enter into research agreements with a lab providing that lab is willing to sign an NDA. This would prevent companies like Google, NVIDIA, Apple, and Facebook from working with research labs. This is especially short-sighted since a student who is working at a federally funded university will have to publish their work.

> Federally-funded universities must respond to records requests under terms similar to FOIA (note that FOIA has requestor pay costs)

This is already true. I have known many faculty whose emails were FOIA-able and as a result, they preferred in-person communication for sensitive topics.

> Many companies are only willing to enter into research agreements with a lab providing that lab is willing to sign an NDA. This would prevent companies like Google, NVIDIA, Apple, and Facebook from working with research labs. This is especially short-sighted since a student who is working at a federally funded university will have to publish their work.

There are different types of NDAs. I'm more concerned about the ones which are used to silence whistleblowers than the types used to protect pre-release product information, PII, or partner trade secrets. That's not a difficult split to make. Tools include: (1) Time bounds on NDAs. (2) Domain bounds on NDAs. (3) Publishing the agreements themselves.

This goes for a broader set of abuses too -- not just research fraud, but also sexual abuse, gross negligence, corruption, etc. A lot of this stuff goes on at elite schools, and lots of people are bullied or bribed into signing their rights to talk about this stuff away.

> This is already true. I have known many faculty whose emails were FOIA-able and as a result, they preferred in-person communication for sensitive topics.

This is not true in general, but it is on some specific government projects. Most normal grants (NSF, etc.), it's definitely not true on.

As a footnote, odds are if faculty weren't willing to conduct business by email, something improper was going on. That thought process is common in a corporate setting, but not in an academic setting.

> The latter is tricky, since you don't want to smear the researcher without proof, but you also don't want to trust results.

IMO it's the build-up of univestaged allegations which makes them so damning. If we actually had justice the upper classes, small allegations were frequent, and investigations were de rigueur, we could actually have functioning "innocence until proven guilty" in the culture.

Relatedly, we should probably all have minor criminal records and it should be no big deal.

let's add

* Portion of faculty which must be tenured.