Yes most PI’s are happy to avoid the embarrassment and only want to publish good data.
The problem is not that most scientists are not trying to do the right thing, but that they are under enormous pressure to pump out the results. It only takes a few falling to this pressure to destroy the public’s faith in science - the consequence of this are catastrophic.
We must solve this problem or we will not have science.
I know very little about academia. But, in the context of today's world of information and collaboration, it always seems to me that it should be a better time than any to (A) have a better than publication and (B) put a lot more into reproducing results independently. I mean what is the whole publication, review, reproduction system if not an early system of crowdsourcing.
To take a simplistic example: a publication norm which includes instructions for reproduction, ideally requiring as little resources as possible.
Instructions for reproduction are mandatory already. That said, you probably can't pick up any paper and reproduce the experiments exactly without asking the authors a question or two, at least in biology.
Systems are getting increasingly complex as well. In my lab, it literally takes several weeks for people to learn how to do our assay, and that's with constant feedback from an experienced user. Every step is published but that still doesn't help when things don't go according to plan. Also, not every lab has the same equipment. Even if we provided free training, a lab would still need to drop $300k to get all the machines required, which are not common.
Not every result is worth reproducing either. If someone publishes a paper that shows several lines of evidence for the same thing and they've done all reasonable controls, and it doesn't disagree with any existing models, why would you reproduce that? Outside of deliberate fraud, it's a pretty solid bet that it's true, and you can save enormous amounts of time and money by proceeding to build off of it instead of reproducing it first. And that's really what it comes down to: no one's paying you to do this kind of work. Governments would have to fund it, because you're fundamentally asking for twice as much work to be done, which will cost twice as much money (and time).
But take heart: when someone DOES make an outrageous claim, it's very common for labs to try to reproduce it (or really, disprove it). See [1] and [2] for recent examples.
If I was a fraud this is exactly what I would do. Take an existing paper and just make up the results that confirm the work with a slight twist to make it publishable. Rinse and repeat and nobody will ever catch you.
The problem is not that most scientists are not trying to do the right thing, but that they are under enormous pressure to pump out the results. It only takes a few falling to this pressure to destroy the public’s faith in science - the consequence of this are catastrophic.
We must solve this problem or we will not have science.