As I read these comments, I feel forced to ask the question as to whether there are ever "negative" results...maybe "results" are just results. The "negative" only comes from assumptions, hopes, expectations...all of which drive the rationale and meaning of good scientific research. However, if we accept that any result that forwards our knowledge is a result...an outcome. An outcome is neither positive or negative...OR always positive in that it is an OUTCOME.

One objective of the scientific, positivist research is to find a reality and exists aside from beliefs, assumptions, expectations. While I am not a great proponent of positivism, this discussion does beg the question as to whether values-free research, devoid of subjective assumptions,does exist...whether it ever exists. I say this because it is our values that may be the single determinant as to what research we do, let alone publish.

The internet has offered a place to publish anything...anything at all. Therefore, the public is confused, researchers are confused...and here we are debating whether negative results are worth publishing... ??

I am also for publishing negative results as it would definitely help someone in the same field......because every researcher will go through a phase flooded with negative results or no results.....so getting to know "things not to do" will definitely help to if not avoid atleast minimize the lagging period......

But the guides should also encourage their students to publish it....and researchers nowadays strive to write "we are the first to report " ........

I agree with Yahia. In my country there is strong influence of belief that only ''positive'' result must be published and only impact factor and number of published papers is something that automatically means that someone is ''excellent''. Instead of conclusion, I would like to ask only one question ''What happened with true science and professional ethic?''

I agree with Yahia. But I believe that it is common for papers with mixed results to be rejected.

Generaly researchers publish only positive results. Sometimes, researchers select only their "best" results and hide some results that are embarassing for explanation (when the discussion on the results seems speculative). Maybe they think that papers, with negative results or speculations, will be rejected or their works will be underestimated.
I think researchers should expose their works (positive and negative results) with transparency and editors should accept them in their journals. At least, this will be more compatible with the ethics and the research integrity.

It might be a useful location to mine for free images I can publish with my work on tissue psychology. I was looking at this one single picture of basket cell neurons and wishing it were clearer, or would print out to a larger picture. But all the pay-walls have made me gunshy about getting an account, just to harvest pictures. If you say it is free, I might be tempted however to start an account.

Is there any way to work back from the source, to the picture authors for assignment of rights to reproduce the pictures? If I do ever publish I would like all the t's crossed and I's dotted.

Forgot to mention - images are downloadable or you can set up your own account on The Cell and tag images to photoboxes for later use. All free of course.

Graeme,

We have the full range of licensing options with a very large number of public domain images. If you are exclusively interested in public domain images, please see our advanced search page, where you can request to only see public domain images. Each image clearly shows the licensing requirements right underneath the image on the detailed image page.

This does of course, beg the question of whether there are sufficient other places in the system to post negative results, but thanks for the offer, if I had cell images I might be tempted. I might still be tempted if only to gather cell images that were open for public domain use, if that is the case with the library.

You can post negative results at The Cell: An Image Library http://cellimagelibrary.org. Your cell images might be useful to other researchers in a number of ways you might not have imagined. A large experimental set might be used to train a pattern recognition algorithm, something perhaps not intended in the research. Or some other researcher may be able to query your data set for a different question, or you may save a researcher repeating your experiment so that they are free to conduct a different experiment.

Some of the most acrimonious debates in science history have had as their basis just such rivalries.

I think we have two or three things going on here.

In my field "Artificial Consciousness" there have been many papers that claim the first stages or proofs of consciousness but then aren't followed up on later, and one is left wondering if they have gone black, the student was more talented in a different area, or experiments simply failed.

My personal assumption is all of the above, many of them have gone black, either in corporate development or in government development systems, and many have been abandoned by researchers with wider talents that moved in a new direction, and many had failed and been abandoned or had their program funding cut when they didn't pan out in a short enough period.

I think a project based on figuring out which ideas have been followed up on, and which have failed, would be informative for anyone in the industry, albeit embarrassing for those who went black and subsequently failed. (Which we will probably never know about anyway).

But, most Artificial Consciousness theories are supported by senior scientists that have reached tenure on another topic, and can accept failure in a particular paper without loss, as a result. It merely becomes a factor of EGO as to whether they WILL accept failure, unfortunately tenured professors are not want to take EGO shots, and so will tend to pan anything that shows that their own work was a failure or at least not properly developed as an experiment.

This means that counter to what we really want in science, Tenure tends to work against publication of negative results.

Finally there is the Image of science as being non-political until you look at what goes on inside, where politics often are more influential than we would want them to be. Church and Turing come up with a thesis that A.I. can be done because Turing Machines can represent any system based on Axioms.

But what this really means is that mathematics is consistent under all interpretations of the peano Axioms. Godel then proves that mathematics is inconsistent and therefore incomplete under a particular set of statements made under the peano algorythms, and politically it is decided to ignore this and assume that Church-Turings statement about A.I. still stands un-tarnished.

Later, in an attempt to refute Church-Turing that is again political in nature, a decision is made to claim that A.I. is impossible because it can't be done under the Peano Algorithms. But, while the thesis might be sound for Church-Turing based works, it is also applied to non-turing based work as a political decision again, having nothing to do with any non-turing thesis of A.I.

In all of these cases politics trumped good science, and negative papers might have shown that it was politics not good science that determined which papers would be allowed to go through and which weren't. Those with political agendas are not all that interested in letting their political maneuverings be seen by the public, and so Politics will tend to claim victories over science, even when that is not the case experimentally.

There are I think good and sufficient reasons for both a negative results paper collection, and a positive results but rejected paper collection, in the industry, but also good and sufficient reasons why senior scientists would be discomforted by their existence. Since in many cases senior scientists set the political agendas for a particular scientific institution, their discomfort is not lightly taken on, and may simply be an attack by another institution due to a natural rivalry.