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Medical Journals Fight Burying of Inconvenient Research
A dozen leading medical journals have announced that they plan to refuse publication of clinical studies unless those studies were publicly registered ahead of time. Part of the intention is to prevent researchers from privately doing multiple studies and then selectively releasing for publication only those which yield favorable results. There are many other journals which have not signed on to this plan, however, and it remains to be seen what will happen. Personally, I'm surprised it's taken this long; as Karl Popper wrote, "what distinguishes the scientific approach and method from the prescientific approach is the method of attempted falsification."
I've always wanted to start a journal called "Journal of Null Results" where people can publish research that's well done, but came up with a result that doesn't qualify as earthshaking or "sexy".
Publishing null results would help people avoid repeating things that have been done already, as well as help refine research to see if there is a positive result hidden in the null.
In the case of big medical studies it could provide a great source for data mining, where metastudies of a bunch of null results might suggest something that would be hard to see without a lot of overlapping data.