Negative Irreproducible Tweets For Science Publishing

New submitter mwolfam writes "Every scientist has at least one paper or graph tucked in a folder that lies in a dusty corner of the hard drive next to that dancing baby that used to be all the rage. The data is interesting, but doesn't lend itself to the creation of the grand narrative you must have for a traditional publication. It's time to expand traditional scientific publication to include a place for the data that normally falls through the cracks: short but interesting bits of data, negative results, and irreproducible results."

Comments

It's been done

[SoftwareArtist]

Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments

Ok, some of the humor is a bit esoteric for those who don't know much molecular biology. You'll just have to take my word for it that it's really funny!

All of this has been done / possible / etc.

[oneiros27]

For #1, there was The Journal of Earth Science Phenomena (hasn't had anything new in over a year), where they'd publish what they called 'micro-articles', which was mostly just a picture and a short description. Unlike a tweet, it actually had some peer-review, and enough information to make the item useful in its own regard. In solar physics, it's not a journal, but there's the Heliophysics Event Registry, where scientists can submit events/features/phenomena, but it's not peer reviewed. (and some are submitted via pipeline processing, so there might not've been any human involved in the detection other than writing the software)

For the negative results, there are plenty of dedicated journals in various fields, and if there isn't, there's always PLoS ONE. It's possible that they might take the irreproducable stuff, too. In their description, they say they'll take anything that's 'technically sound'. They do use a model that's different from other peer-reviewed journals, and go with the author-pays approach, which many of the other journals claim makes them invalid (yet, those same journals charge even more to make your article 'open access' if it gets accepted)