Could it be simplified it even further to say x number of papers, but they only count if they’re replicated by others in the field?

I'd argue that since replication is somehow faster than original research, the requirement would count a replication somewhat lower than an original paper (say, at 0.75).

The non-easy part of this is once we start making changes to the criteria for tenure, this opens up people trying to stuff all the solutions for all of the problems that everyone knows already. (See Above.) Would some one try to stuff code-available for CS conference papers, for example? What does it mean for a poster session? At what point are papers released for pre-print? What does it mean for the tenure clock or the Ph.D clock? Does it mean that pre-tenure can't depend on studies that take time to replicate? What do we do with longitudinal studies?

I think you're looking at a 50 year transition where you would have to start simple and iterate.

First, people that want to be professors normally do so because they want to steer their research agenda, not repeat what other people are doing without contribution. Second, who works in their lab? Most of the people doing the leg work in a lab are PhD students, and, to graduate, they need to do something novel to write up in their dissertation. Thus, they can’t just replicate three experiments and get a doctorate. Third, you underestimate how specialized lab groups are — both in terms of the incredibly expensive equipment it is equipped with and the expertise within the lab. Even folks in the same subfield (or even in the same research group!) often don’t have much in common when it comes to interests, experience, and practical skills.

For every lab doing new work, you’d basically need a clone of that lab to replicate their work.

If we're talking about weird incentives and academia you hit on one of the worst ones right here, I think, since nothing there is very closely connected to helping students learn.

I know that's a dead horse, but it's VERY easy to find reasons that we shouldn't be too closely attached to the status quo.

> For every lab doing new work, you’d basically need a clone of that lab to replicate their work.

Hell, that's how startup funding works, or market economies in general. Top-down, non-redundant systems are way more fragile than distributed ecosystems. If you don't have the competition and the complete disconnection, you so much more easily fall into political games of "how do we get this published even if it ain't great" vs "how do we find shit that will survive the competition"

A Ph.D would be expected to perform some replication research as part of their package.

Finally, we would start with the fields that are easy to replicate and move up. We couldn't replicate CERN if we tried. But we could implement this in psychology tomorrow, for example.

If someone wins the Nobel Prize, do the people who replicated their work also win it? When the history books are written do the replicators get equal billing to the people who made the discovery?

When selecting candidates for prestigious positions, are they really going to consider a replicator equal to an original researcher?