As an ex-academic, my personal experience was that two out of three academic labs that I worked in were engaged in fraudulent activities (but at the time, I didn't think to carry hidden microphones and microcameras around like a spy to document what was going on). The third lab was very high quality, though. The key differences? The good lab had:<p>1) Rigorous lab notebook policies - everything had to be documented and signed off on, and there the PI conducted a weekly lab notebook review with each grad student (note this was a fairly small lab, for some large labs this might be difficult, but in that case postdocs could review grad students and the PI reviews the postdocs). This led to one grad student getting booted from the lab for cooking data at one point.<p>2) Weekly lab meetings with review of progress and open discussion of any issues, such as uncertainties in data quality and so on, with all members present. No secret squirrel meetings or people trying to figure out how to cook the results for publication or patents or what not.<p>The frauds had either no or badly flawed notebook policies (record data using a pencil so it could be erased or altered later), a highly secretive modus operandi, lots of whispering in corners, grad students being pressured to get 'the desired result', etc. This goes on all the time, and generally only high-profile bogus claims are the ones that get any public scrutiny.<p>As far as why this behavior is common in academia? Well, if the PIs <i>think</i> they know how a system works then they can just invent data to back their belief and hope that someone else diligently replicates it, so they can be first to publish and get the prizes, career advancement, patents etc. that come with that. A fair number of big-name scientists have probably gotten away with this - an indication is that they make a big splash in a field and then never do much else with it. (At the grad student level, they'll invent positive (publishable) results just to get their degree and move on).<p>Solution: academics with government funding should be forced to endure audits of their lab notebooks and data retention policies by an independent party on a regular basis.