Everyone in science knows about these problems. But surprisingly few people do anything about it.

The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik has an extraordinary ability to spot duplicated or faked images in scientific journals: She has spotted hundreds over the years. But she told Nature that even five years after she’d reported the fakes to the journals, most of them had not been dealt with.

The Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop says this matches her own experience: “If one points out academic malpractice to publishers or institutions, there is often no reply.”

There are plenty of other issues with scientific research and publishing. Journals take scientists’ work for free or even charge to publish it, then charge them again for access.

Editors at one journal walked out recently over “unethical” publishing fees. And the demand for “positive” results incentivizes scientists to hack the data up until they find something. Those are deep systemic problems within science.

But outright fraud, you’d think, should be easy to fix if detected. And yet the scientific community often ignores it, undermining the entirety of science: If a large percentage of studies are fake, how can we trust the progress science does make?

Greater transparency, including full publication of data and code as standard for all papers, would be a start, but ultimately the incentive structure of science has to change.