Handling negative research results
Abstract
Diamond OA Publishers should make the editorial teams of their journals aware of this bias and of their publisher-level policy regarding the publication of negative or unexpected scientific results and data.
Main Text
The Diamond Open Access Standard’s (DOAS) guidelines recommend that Diamond OA Publishers acknowledge as a matter of publisher policy that the publication of negative or unexpected scientific results and data that do not confirm the initial hypotheses and experimental designs of the authors, contribute to the advancement of science and scholarship.
Typically, journals and editors tend to privilege positive and original results, which leads to the ‘reproducibility crisis’: many, if not most, studies cannot be reproduced. As a result, it is important for publishers and journals to correct this bias towards positive results, and pay particular attention to replication studies showing that a given result cannot in fact be reproduced, demonstrating that the initial hypothesis is falsified.
Discipline-specific considerations
A publication policy encouraging the publication of negative results is mostly relevant for those (sub)disciplines that are concerned with testing hypotheses on the basis of data. Many disciplines in the humanities engage in research and scholarship that do not typically adopt this research process, from philosophy to comparative literature and critical editions. At the same time, it is important not to exclude the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines too quickly from the publication of negative results. Historical research in archives, for instance, could also lead to interesting negative results that scholars in the field may wish to be aware of.
Related toolsuite articles
Related guidelines and training materials
References
- Consortium of the DIAMAS project. (2024). The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12179619
Further reading
- Bik, Elisabeth M. (2024).’Publishing negative results is good for science Open Access’. Access Microbiology, 6.4, https://doi.org/10.1099/acmi.0.000792
- Enago Academy. (2021). Why should negative results be published?
- https://www.enago.com/academy/why-should-negative-results-be-published/
- Nimpf, Simon & David A. Keays. (2020). ‘Why (and how) we should publish negative data’. EMBO Reports 21, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6945059/
- Popper, Karl. 1959. The logic of scientific discovery. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.
Licensing
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License