Everyone hears about the roaring successes in R&D, but the duds can end up quietly swept under the carpet. Who will remember these excursions up blind alleys when someone next comes up with the same brilliant idea?
Talk to R&D managers in many industries and they will tell you that they work hard to ensure that everyone in the business has access to the collective wisdom that comes through many years of failed projects and experiments. Some companies address this issue with IT systems that set out to capture that experience, but the open literature, where you don’t get brownie points for failed experiments, isn’t stuffed with such accounts.
Biomedcentral (BMC) is doing something about this in some areas of science. It has launched BMC Research Notes.
“BMC Research Notes is an open access journal publishing scientifically sound research across all fields of biology and medicine, enabling authors to publish updates to previous research, software tools and databases, data sets, small-scale clinical studies, and reports of confirmatory or ‘negative’ results.”
As yet, the venture is limited to the life sciences, which means that some of us can’t even understand the titles of the papers. But many an idea has started there and found its way into the wider worlds of science.
They say that:
“The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article.”
It seems most unlikely that physics and chemistry, for example, are immune to this phenomenon.
