Of course science is not a scam.

The question is firmly answered "no" merely because it is asked by via a computer, sending that question to about a thousand subscribers spread around the planet, each who is likely to pay less for "internet" than they do for power or water.
It's "Science" because it works, and when it doesn't, it just proved itself to not be Science.

> The rush to publicate and for that 
> publication to be unique is a major 
> driver in faulty scientific discoveries.

Science is a full-body contact sport.  Being first matters, but tell that to the PSU/USDA team who claimed IAPv to be the proximate cause of CCD, only to later find that far older samples in the same freezer also had significant IAPv.  Being first does not matter unless one is also correct. Most "Faulty discoveries" are eventually outed, but, just for example, the retraction of the IAPv paper in "Science" was printed in an article in the beekeeping magazine "American Bee Journal", not because the letters section of "Science" would not print a simple retraction, but because the authors of the "Science" paper and/or the suits at their respective institutions wanted to hide the retraction.  No one has yet asked the crucial question about who buried that retraction and why.

> Quite often the negative is rarely published

There have been several proposals for journals dedicated to logging negative outcomes, but the problem is funding.  There is not widespread comprehension of the value of a large database of negative results, as few people sail, and have thus enjoyed the value of "excellent charts" that show the depth and width of navigational channels.  We even make fun of ourselves in the "Journal of Irreproducible Results" (JIR) and several well-read blogs (Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science", et al.), not ever grocking that a legit and serious "Journal of Irreproducible Results" would be a very good thing.

I don't have an answer on the wholesale side, and I don't expect any solutions to come from the consumer side.  People are very interested in "science", but most of this interest has been "fulfilled" by "amusing and interesting" podcasts.  My wife listens to the 24x7 Sports-Talk radio call-in shows on NYC's WFAN (or, as I call it "The Jets/Mets/Giants/Yankees fan suicide hotline"), but science only appears on the public radio station 2 hours a week, and is given a very breezy treatment by a host that limits himself to gee-whiz coverage of NASA and whatever else is trendy.

Pseudo-science IS a scam, and that's one of the reasons for the pomp and circumstance surrounding "publication" and "refereed journals".  The hope is to filter out the scams, the charlatans, and the mistaken.  

Mostly, it works.  I still get thick 10 x 12 envelopes in the mail containing tomes of varying levels of coherence from folks who are absolutely sure that they have a solution to settle the Riemann hypothesis or P versus NP, or a clever way to shoehorn "dark matter/dark energy" into the existing fundamentals of physics, and some of them are even typed, rather than scrawled in crayon on both sides of 77 sheets of spiral-bound notebook paper, but all of them ask for help in "getting published".  Bee Science does not have this problem as bad as other fields, as there are many online services and multiple groups that can only be called "cults" in which to air such speculative claims.

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