1. Once area we could stop is useless data-mined correlation studies that show statistical significance (assuming you ignore that data-mining has occurred) between action X and outcome Y - the sort where a retrospective study of 500,000 nurses finds that eating candied peanuts reduces prostate cancer by 15%. The rule of thumb in any of these studies is that unless the effect is 300% or greater (smoking and lung cancer is 1500%) then the result is certain to be garbage.
2. We need less “novel” research and more replication of past results. The whole scientific system is set up to reward novelty over accuracy. It is so bad that unless I have seen two independent groups repeat something I doubt it is real no matter how famous the group.
3. We need to reward being right over being first. Right now groups rush papers out so they don’t get scooped and so don’t check their results as well as they should. I would personally like to remove the date off all scientific papers to stop these silly games - after all if something is true does it become less true just because it was published last year rather than last week.
4. We need to reward people who put the effort into replicating work. A simple proposal would be to give publication right to every group that replicated (or could not replicate) a study in the same journal. If some study is published in Nature and you go to the effort of replicating it then you should get an automatic Nature publication.
5. Stop scientist from holding on to raw data. In theory scientist are supposed to share their data, but in practice this doesn’t happen very often. It should be possible to report groups that don’t share data to the funding bodies and if they are found to not be not sharing (or only sharing some of the data) then the group is banned from getting any new funding. It would only take a few banning to stop this immoral data hoarding.