Or, something less catastrophic: Journal of negative results. At the end of 2008 I went to a conference about information and medicines. One of the speakers was Richard Smith, board member of PLoS. His talk was about clinical trials and publications and his main complain was that all clinical trials should be published not only these trials with positive and good results.

Some days ago, a researcher who is leaving my research group did a seminar about her research during her stay in the group. She show some results for each project but She also included a section called “Negative results”. And in this section She talk about all things regarding this kind of results.

Usually, when we work in research and publish our results we only publish “positive” things, it is really strange to find a paper telling that something is not possible or telling that an experiment is not successful. As Richard Smith said regarding clinical trials, I think all results should be published. It does not mean publish all results, obviously nonsense studies/results should be avoided but almost all thinks should be in papers. If I read that an experiment is not useful provably I will not do it.

I know that is more interesting publish amazing results and that it is not exciting publish a paper telling that something is not working, but is also interesting to know it.

Imagine you know to produce wheels and a friend of you know to build roads. Both of you need to know the required specifications of the product of the other but you don’t want to share your knowledge. You want to “protect” your invention and you will not tell to your friend which kind of road is required for your wheels. Provably, both of you will do a good job but, unfortunately, incompatible. Your wheel will not be able to run in the roads of your friend.

I know its is a nonsense example. But, the wheels of the trains cannot run in our roads as the car wheels cannot run in the rails. If I build a road I know how are the wheels that will run on it.

In science it does not happen. Usually I have an idea, I will try to develop it and I will publish it. But, maybe, some kilometers far from me an other person is doing something similar, provably this person will have the same questions that I have, and some different questions and, maybe, solutions for my questions as maybe I can solve some of his questions. But, In our closed scientific world, this logical share of knowledge will be a race for the publication. I think the solution will be faster if the scientists share their knowledge instead of compete only for the publication.

Fortunately, in some fields we have some consensus names, databases,… “open things” that help us to standardize some names and, as a minimum, avoid that each scientist calls his molecules or proteins with the name He decided. As example of it we have Inchis, PDB keys, SwissProt Ids,…

I thinks researches are doing a public service and as a public service it will be optimized and it means to be more efficient. Focus our objectives as advances not only as publications. It is one of the reasons that motivated me to create this blog. Welcome and, please, enjoy it!