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A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to viewing science in simple terms, it can be challenging for scientists to articulate counterarguments to policies that increase transparency and accountability in the name of efficiency. This short piece offers a sketch of an argument against treating efficiency as the lodestar for science. 

A series of failed replications and frauds have raised questions regarding self-correction in science. Metascientific activists have advocated policies that incentivize replications and make them more diagnostically potent. We argue that current debates, as well as research in science and technology studies, have paid little heed to a key dimension of replication practice. Although it sometimes serves a diagnostic function, replication is commonly motivated by a practical desire to extend research interests. The resulting replication, which we label ‘integrative’, is characterized by a pragmatic flexibility toward protocols. The goal is to appropriate what is useful, not test for truth. Within many experimental cultures, however, integrative replications can produce replications of ambiguous diagnostic power. Based on interviews with 60 members of the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal Science, we show how the interplay between the diagnostic and integrative motives for replication differs between fields and produces different cultures of replication. We offer six theses that aim to put science and technology studies and science activism into dialog to show why effective reforms will need to confront issues of disciplinary difference.