> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work.

What if we got Undergrads (with hope of graduate studies) to do it? Could be a great way to train them on the skills required for research without the pressure of it also being novel?

Those undergrads still need to be advised and they use lab resources.

If you're a tenure-track academic, your livelihood is much safer from having them try new ideas (that you will be the corresponding author on, increasing your prestige and ability to procure funding) instead of incrementing.

And if you already have tenure, maybe you have the undergrad do just that. But the tenure process heavily filters for ambitious researchers, so it's unlikely this would be a priority.

If instead you did it as coursework, you could get them to maybe reproduce the work, but if you only have the students for a semester, that's not enough time to write up the paper and make it through peer review (which can take months between iterations)

Most interesting results are not so simple to recreate that would could reliably expect undergrads to do perform the replication even if we ignore the cost of the equipment and consumables that replication would need and the time/supervision required to walk them through the process.

Unfortunately, that might just lead to a bunch of type II errors instead, if an effect requires very precise experimental conditions that undergrads lack the expertise for.