The problem is bigger. It even blocks research!

In my own experience I was unable to publish a few works because I was unable to outperform a "competitor" (technically we're all on the same side, right?). So I dig more and more into their work and really try to replicate their work. I can't! Emailing the authors I get no further and only more questions. I submit the papers anyways, adding a section about replication efforts. You guessed it, rejected. With explicit comments from reviewers about lack of impact due to "competitor's" results.

Is an experience I've found a lot of colleagues share. And I don't understand it. Every failed replication should teach us something new. Something about the bounds of where a method works.

It's odd. In our strive for novelty we sure do turn down a lot of novel results. In our strive to reduce redundancy we sure do create a lot of redundancy.

Advanced groups usually replicate their competitor's results in their own hands shortly after publication (or they just trust their competitor's competence). But they don't spend any time publishing it unless they fail to replicate and can explain why they can't replicate. From their perspective, it's a waste of time. I think this has been shown to be a naive approach (given the high rate of image fraud in molecular biology) but people who are in the top of the field have strong incentives to focus on moving the state of the art forward without expending energy on improving the field as a whole.