"Confirmatory labs would be less dependent on positive results than the original researchers, a situation that should promote the publication of null and negative results. They would be rewarded by authorship on published papers, service fees, or both. They would also be more motivated to build a reputation for quality and competence than to achieve a particular finding."
Sounds great, but how would this actually work. Nobody is going to get juicy grants from existing funding agencies for being a "confirmatory" lab. Nature sure as hell isn't going to pay for this. Most researchers probably can't afford to pay an outside lab to duplicate their research. Is Nature going to suddenly start refusing papers whose results haven't been reproduced elsewhere? That's basically suicide for their journal because researchers are frequently in a race with other researchers to publish first, so why publish with a journal that requires you to double your budget to pay a confirmatory lab and wait months or years for them to do the job? The pressure will be intense to publish elsewhere first.
I have a simpler solution.
Don't just slap the names of confirmatory lab authors onto other papers. Publish original papers and publish confirmatory papers with equal prominence to the original papers. Hell, devote a portion of Nature to doing just that. Currently, if you want to publish a paper about confirming someone else's original findings, not even a third rate journal will touch it unless you put at least some kind of novel-sounding spin on it. Nature should use all that scummy impact factor gaming they do to make confirmatory papers respectable. Only when the work of reproducing results gains labs respect will funding agencies start supporting "confirmation labs". At present, such "unoriginal", "hack" work is not respected at all, and Nature is a big part of the reason why.
Sounds great, but how would this actually work. Nobody is going to get juicy grants from existing funding agencies for being a "confirmatory" lab. Nature sure as hell isn't going to pay for this. Most researchers probably can't afford to pay an outside lab to duplicate their research. Is Nature going to suddenly start refusing papers whose results haven't been reproduced elsewhere? That's basically suicide for their journal because researchers are frequently in a race with other researchers to publish first, so why publish with a journal that requires you to double your budget to pay a confirmatory lab and wait months or years for them to do the job? The pressure will be intense to publish elsewhere first.
I have a simpler solution.
Don't just slap the names of confirmatory lab authors onto other papers. Publish original papers and publish confirmatory papers with equal prominence to the original papers. Hell, devote a portion of Nature to doing just that. Currently, if you want to publish a paper about confirming someone else's original findings, not even a third rate journal will touch it unless you put at least some kind of novel-sounding spin on it. Nature should use all that scummy impact factor gaming they do to make confirmatory papers respectable. Only when the work of reproducing results gains labs respect will funding agencies start supporting "confirmation labs". At present, such "unoriginal", "hack" work is not respected at all, and Nature is a big part of the reason why.