[sn41]

With my modest experience as an expert witness in courts, I am against this. It is very difficult to make judges understand, for example, how science works - one can only be so sure, and we go ahead with that, for example, in medicine, as well as cryptography. Judges have a hard time appreciating this nuance.

I agree that something stricter should be done, but it should not be about bringing the legal system into play. I see a fundamental issue with bringing science to trial courts, where rhetoric, appeals to emotions, and other different priorities are paramount, not technicalities about overenthusiastic interpretations, data fudging, p-hacking, empirical anomalies and wilful data manipulation.

Science works by different norms of truth (I would call this statistical) than the judicial system does (beyond reasonable doubt/preponderance of evidence). I believe an international peer scientific committee ostracising a person from publication for X number of years, or forever, might be a better measure than a criminal trial and punishment in open court.

[rcxdude]

I think if it were to make sense, it would have to be similar standards to perjury: wilfully making a materially false statement about your data or process in a published paper. I.e. only targeting outright fraud in statements of fact about what you did and observed. The conclusions from that data would not make sense to include in that umbrella: firstly because as you mention they are difficult to judge and are in fact for pretty much any paper up for debate, and secondly because that's the part that is expected to be assesed by the process of peer review and pulishing anyway.

I'd say that at the moment there's a bit of an issue with the way the community handles this kind of thing, in a way which is akin in structure (I'm not comparing severity/morality) to sexual assault in many communities (science also among them): it's sadly common that someone is widely known or suspected within their field to engage in scientific fraud, but it's only known within that because that person has enough power to make it dangerous to overtly make an accusation, as well as a general fear that it will discredit the field in general. And someone with a bad reputation there still often gets to engage with the community. It seems that only in the really high-profile cases are there actual consequences, and even then they often only come out long after the offender has retired.

(I'm not entirely convinced criminalising it will actually reduce the problem, though. The idea that harsher punishments = less misbehaviour is a bit of a fallacy in part because people who do this don't expect to be caught)

[AnimalMuppet]

Courts and judges may not understand how science works, but they understand how false statements work. They have centuries of experience with that. Libel, slander, lying under oath, false testimony, perjury... they've seen it all, over and over and over and over.

Willful data manipulation? They may see it more often with financial data, but they've seen it, rather often. And they aren't finance experts either, but they still deal with it competently.

The alternative is that science exists outside the legal system. A scientist can engage in misconduct in a way that gets believed for a while and results in multiple deaths, with no legal consequences? That can't be right.

[_DeadFred_]

The legal system is incompatible with this very concept. The legal system works on precedent. Once something is established by the court, it is treated as fact, forever, with an EXTREMELY high bar to get changed. US courts still impose polygraph testing (at significant cost to those forced to take them) on people on probation even though polygraphs are no longer allowed to convict and just plain don't work.

[inglor_cz]

"It is very difficult to make judges understand, for example, how science works"

Isn't that true about white collar crime in general? Some frauds or tax evasion schemes are very elaborate. We still (try to) prosecute them.

[Zigurd]

It's not about crimes against science any more than financial fraud is about crimes against money. Science fraud is about falsification, same as financial crime.