Very true for the field of study. In Biology, there is a very different way of managing projects and students depending on whether you work in Molecular & Cellular Biology, or rather in Ecology & Evolution. I’m in the latter, and while it’s not without problem, it’s the land of fluffy bears compared to what some of my university friends who worked in cellular biology…

Sorry, I couldn’t really help you there, I’m working in evolutionary biology, we don’t do patents and industry much. However, I would tell that I don’t believe pre-registration is the silver bullet for any research. Even beyond your case, there are much research in my area that is not hypothesis driven, more exploratory or completely inferential (which is totally OK!), for which pre-registration makes very little sense.

Hm, the first step is fully enforce Open Science, and, when relevant, pre-registration. This would make fraud much harder to begin with (though not impossible of course). Then, those “detectives” would (hopefully) have a manageable workload.

Isn’t what Kbin is about?