(Oct. 1st, 2009) Are you ever frustrated when looking through your lab notebooks at all those experimental results that never got published? Well, fear not, with the creation of a new series of research journals, a solution may be at hand. Welcome, reports Jeremy Garwood, to ‘The All Results Journals’, open access publications intended to capture perfectly valid experimental results that never quite made it to print.
Set up in 2008 by Spanish biologist, David Alcántara Parra, The All Results Journals (ARJournals) represents his personal attempt to address what he considers to be a major error in the existing system of scientific publication. In an interview, published in the online magazine LabLit, he states, “The idea for journals that publish secondary (negative) results has been going around my head since the second year of my PhD. I had discussed this idea with several colleagues at work and at scientific meetings and to my surprise they also saw the need for these types of publications.”
Parra’s main concern is that there is a huge mass of experimental data locked up in lab notebooks that could be of great service to the scientific community at large: “Do you know the real number of related experiments that have been done by others before your data is published? At present, within the research community, many experiments fail to produce results or expected discoveries. Even though, as in many cases this would be frustrating from an objective viewpoint, this high percentage of ‘failed’ research can still generate high quality knowledge.”
The main objective of ARJournals is to recover and publish these valuable pieces of scientific information: “These secondary experiments should be taken into account as a vital key for the development of science. They are the catalyst for real science-based empirical knowledge,” Parra, Editor and CEO, tells LabLit. “Our journals will cover subjects that are easy to index”, providing “the most complete and reliable source of information on ‘secondary’ (or negative) results in several fields: Biology, Chemistry, Nanotechnology and Physics.”
However, getting a new publishing project up-and-going has not been easy. Although the journals are to be only online, the first and most difficult task was the configuration of the Open Journal System platform to assure complete protection of the data. Then they had to persuade other scientists “to participate with our project for free” since, unlike big publishers they had no money to “reward” an editorial board. Furthermore, there will be no publication charges. But Parra is upbeat: “we have had very good feedback in all our communications with top-level scientists. They have lent us their support and some of them are now on our Scientific Advisory Boards.” The ARJournals project has even won an award for management and innovation from the large Spanish savings bank, Bancaja.
At the ARJournals website (http://www.arjournals.com/ojs/), there is a detailed flow diagram explaining how the editorial and publishing process works. As for other research journals, all submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer review process. Even experimental data that may be considered ‘secondary’ (or negative) must be at an acceptable scientific standard. The Author Guidelines stress: “Very important!: In order to assure that the experiments have not failed by human factors, experiments must have been repeated at least three times.”
When submitting a manuscript, authors are also being advised to place their secondary data in context. They should cite their previous work where they obtained positive results, for example: “…and we therefore want to expand our previous methodology (cite the previously published work).”
“More importantly,” says Parra, “we also advise citing papers from ARJournals when presenting a new paper in other journals, giving a reference in all the conditions/reactions/methodology they have been working on before reaching these results.” For example: “…having done a variety of reactions without success (cite your ARJournals paper) we have improved the method and we present here a new methodology to produce…” He hopes that these citations will provide better tools for reviewers to understand the whole work and the real difficulties that the scientist has been facing when obtaining these results.
Nevertheless, Parra knows this project could take a long time to get established. Scientists already have a lot of demands upon their time - obtaining research funds, teaching and supervising research students. “These tasks already reduce their time for writing ‘normal’ scientific results.” So, will scientists find the time to write up secondary data?
“It’s all about habits. We are not accustomed to writing these types of results, because we haven’t given them the importance they deserve. We throw them away and forget about them. Sometimes they are rescued in a PhD thesis but that is not general behaviour. We have to change the engrained idea that these results are useless, and this is quite a difficult task.”
“Time and habits are the two biggest obstacles we have to deal with, but we see these as new opportunities: to certify all your real work (you can use it to justify projects or research in time schedules); to improve your field (secondary results can be used by others in the same way as positive ones, avoiding repetition of failed working experiments); to act as a catalyst, changing science in the fastest way possible.”
ARJournals have launched a general call for papers: “Don’t throw away your negative data. All your results are good results!”
(Photo: iStockphoto / Gavin Haywood)