Fig. 1

. The strained researcher is tugged away from their ideals by the incentives of the institutions they rely upon for employment and promotion. Practices and behaviours on the left-hand side of the tug-of-war (shaded orange) depict problems of the status quo, where research is focussed more on publishing papers than answering questions. Preferred practices and behaviours on the right-hand side of the tug-of-war (shaded blue) depict a vision for efficient and collaborative science aimed at credibly answering questions. To shift research practices towards reliability, three types of institutional incentives could change, as shown by grey boxes underneath the tug-of-war. First, journals and funders could quickly encourage validation of original research by publishing and funding replication studies. Less likely, journals could publish fewer, more comprehensive and coherent research programmes (both long-term studies and collections of smaller studies on the same research topic), thereby relieving pressures to oversell the importance of small studies. Second, employers could hire individuals with specialised expertise (e.g. data stewards, empiricists, statisticians, and writers), whose employment does not depend on particular research outcomes. Reducing the pyramid structure of academic career paths might promote a more diverse workforce that—without the pressure to maintain professional brands—could be quicker to discard discredited beliefs. Third, funding agencies could curb the benefits of self-promotion and irreproducible results by funding diverse teams, science maintenance (e.g. validation and error detection) as much as innovation, and by selecting randomly from projects that pass particular thresholds (i.e. grant lotteries). Grant lotteries are already being trialled by multiple funding agencies (e.g. the Fetzer Franklin Fund, the Health Research Council of New Zealand, and the Swiss National Science Foundation), but their effects on the reliability of research will depend on which metrics are used to select entrants into the lottery