Her work is pure positive externality: nobody has incentive to pay for it. Journals barely care about fraud (as long as it's not caught by someone else), reviewers don't have much incentive to check carefully for it (and might even be in on the fraud), and the authors engaging in fraud obviously prefer that journals not look too closely.
There are many more interested parties than journals, reviewers, and authors. Universities have incentives to protect their reputations from fraudulent scientists; funding agencies have incentives to protect their funds from being misused, etc. Certainly they don't have resources to exhaustively check the outputs of their scientists, however, and it seems difficult or impossible to quantify the return on investment of such proactive research integrity efforts.
This seems like an area where one of the large science-focused philanthropic organizations -- the Gates Foundation, Allen Institute, Chan Zuckerberg, HHMI, etc. -- would be well positioned to have a huge impact on the quality of scientific output and also reap a large return in terms of positive press for their efforts. Any of these organizations could easily fund an entire team of Elisabeth Biks, not to mention an AI team on the side to augment and partially automate this work.
The problem is really that there are strong incentives to produce this stuff, usually from the universities or hospitals themselves. These aren’t prestigious places, and it’s not in their interest to spotlight how many garbage papers they produce.
There are many more interested parties than journals, reviewers, and authors. Universities have incentives to protect their reputations from fraudulent scientists; funding agencies have incentives to protect their funds from being misused, etc. Certainly they don't have resources to exhaustively check the outputs of their scientists, however, and it seems difficult or impossible to quantify the return on investment of such proactive research integrity efforts.
This seems like an area where one of the large science-focused philanthropic organizations -- the Gates Foundation, Allen Institute, Chan Zuckerberg, HHMI, etc. -- would be well positioned to have a huge impact on the quality of scientific output and also reap a large return in terms of positive press for their efforts. Any of these organizations could easily fund an entire team of Elisabeth Biks, not to mention an AI team on the side to augment and partially automate this work.