Once again, it was not just the reviewers’ desire for attractive and exciting findings that had been exploited, but also their trusting nature. It’s unavoidable that some trust will be involved in the peer review process: reviewers can’t be expected to double-check every single datapoint for signs of tampering. But the lesson of the data fraud stories is that the bar might be set rather too low for true organised scepticism to be taking place. For the sake of the science, it might be time for scientists to start trusting each other a little less.
