I came across this and thought it to be interesting:
You’re invited to submit to a new, experimental online journal called Academia Letters .
We’re looking for ultra-short research papers (800-1600 words), such as brief reports, case studies, or “orphaned” findings and ideas dropped from previously-published work.
Letters are rapidly vetted by scholars researching similar topics. Accepted submissions are assigned a DOI and disseminated to thousands of interested scholars, practitioners, and members of the general public.
Maybe a possible venue for a write-up on all of my previous research projects which failed to gain results that are interesting enough to be publishable. They might be useful for anyone in the future who’s attempting to do the same thing but doesn’t know that it won’t work.
Maybe also a good venue for submitting preliminary research ideas in science and theology?
There was a Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, but it ceased publishing in 2017.
Not a lot of people want to spend time writing a paper that they probably won’t include on their CV or grant applications. I could also see a scenario where people publish fake negative data so others won’t get the scoop on their research. I fully agree with the spirit of the idea, but there are some possible problems when put in practice.
Right, but the bulk of paper writing time (in my experience) is consumed by making sure everything is really convincing, written-up well, polished, etc., sometimes reanalyzing or retaking data to get to that point. Even for failed projects I sometimes already write internally circulated technical notes summarizing what I did and learned, primarily to help future students in the lab in case they are thinking to do something similar. If this experimental journal allows publication of these short, not-so-polished technical notes, that could be useful for the community. (I guess the arxiv pre-print server already serves this purpose to some extent, but I still sense that generally the papers uploaded there tend to be more substantial and in principle submittable to a “real” journal.)
That would cross over to scientific misconduct, I think, and so is no different than doing the same thing in a “real” journal.
I agree with you. If, as you say later, the journal allowed for less than polished papers it would be more attractive. More than once I have heard, “Oh yeah, we tried that too. We failed to see any differences just like you”. That’s a bit frustrating. It does make you wonder how much time, energy, and money is expended to produce the same negative results.
Strikes me as a bad idea. A lot of people would use it to put half-baked, ill-conceived, or useless stuff out there. And no, they wouldn’t leave it off of their C.V. Their whole reason for publishing it would be to pad their C.V. They’d of course be paying publication charges, and the journal would rake it in. Reviewing might suffer.
