We really need a #failed project #archive in material science or at least #solar energy materials..
Its sad that all my #effort put into investigating a material goes wasted if it doesn't work.
It would be very nice if people are able to #publish their failed stuff and still get due credit...may be such an initiative also help overcome fear of publishing open access bcoz its a failed project..
@harikesh
I recall years back hearing of work on a "Journal of Errology" for the reproducibility problem in biomed. It's basically the same: fails are not published, so you can start down the same road another person tried and find, as they did, that it's a dead end. And you, too, fail to share that finding. Though, the ability to blog your results and assign a DOI through The Winnower ought to be the easy, citeable report you need, here. :)
@harikesh Yeah. Knowledge gained with failure is worth quite a lot. It allows everyone else to avoid common pitfalls, try a different approach, eg.
Yes, #publishing failed results are necessary.
But the constraints I find are :
1. lack of #recognition. Journals look for positive results to improve impact factors.
2. Time - You spend lots of time compiling and writing the failed #hypothesis and get rejections. You may utilize that time on another project.
Will it make sense to just create a "Failed projects #archive" without any peer review and protected by #CC BY-SA to make things easier ?
@harikesh I think this is what the "preregistration drive" is supposed to do. I... imagine it hasn't interacted with materials science at all? I know you can preregister on OSF, so that might be a good start? I'm also happy to give you my OSS code for journal publishing, in case you want to make your own in combination with OSF? Main trick is to get proper ISBN and peer review of prereg and editors. But there's certainly ... space... for that sort of thing.
@harikesh https://github.com/sx-archipelagos/sxa is the code. http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/ is the output. A "data journal" for materials science sounds like a great thing.
Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton suggested me to the preregistration drive.
Thanks for the suggestion. I checked on OSF. They allow to publish in some material science journals after preregistering.I will try it out for sure..
(In case any body else not aware of this ..please check preregistration challenge at https://cos.io/prereg/)
Thanks very much for the code too.. But I think, I will have to do some more reading on publishing before diving in...
Any help is highly welcome 🙂
@harikesh Plain old problem, it's called positive-results bias - only positive results get published, null results are often kept indefinitely in a researcher's desk drawer and forgotten.
@harikesh I wonder how many failed efforts are duplicated because of the fear of publishing experiments that just show that, nope, the hypothesis was wrong and this method doesn't work.