Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, January 05, 2009

Call for OA to null results

Doctor Spurt, Proposal: The Journal of Null Results, Effortless Incitement, January 5, 2009.

... [T]here's a lot of research that in some sense fails to find anything. More specifically, what is found isn't far from the 'null hypothesis' that there is no interesting relationship between the variables measured, or no effect of the experimental manipulation.

Journals mostly have a strong preference for articles that do find something, which means something other than an outcome consistent with the null hypothesis. That is, they prefer 'positive' results. ...

There should be a web-based Open Access Journal of Null Results. ...

Comment. For examples, see the OA Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, Journal of Negative Results (ecology and evolutionary biology), and Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.