Best mechanism to report negative results

Dear All,

I was wondering what would be the best way to regularly publish negative results, since such work is not likely to be accepted anywhere and this is a problem for the community.

Maybe setting up some web-based resource might be a good idea. Is anybody else worried about this and looking for a good way to publish and more importantly, make available, negative results.

I have recently been trying to implement a simple heterotachous model in RAxML to resolve a hard phylogeny, but it doesn’t work at all. So where could I report this?

Alexis

Is it frowned upon to publish this sort of technical autopsy to arXiv? Or perhaps to Figshare?

I would have thought it is fine to post such things to arxiv.

From their title, it seems like the Journal of Negative Results - Ecology & Evolutionary Biology would be happy to hear from you.

I can’t think of a good reason why Biorxiv wouldn’t want to publish negative results, although at the moment articles are in three categories:

New Results is most appropriate for articles that describe an advance in a field.
Confirmatory Results should be selected if the findings largely replicate and confirm previously published work.
Contradictory Results should be selected if the studies largely replicate experimental approaches used in previously published work but the results contradict and/or do not support it.

Biorxiv is new, and perhaps they just need a nudge to include a 4th category.

Hi Alexis, I think PLoS ONE ought to take it.