At last! Here's a newspaper article that understands the true plight of researchers. “The sad truth about science is that most experiments fail and the hypotheses that seduced researchers turn out not to be true or, at least, the studies provide no evidence that they are true”, revealed a story in The New York Times (7 July 2002).

Bjorn Olsen at Harvard Medical School is one of many scientists who want to see these negative studies published, as they can still add to our knowledge and they would help prevent other researchers from going down the same, unsuccessful route.

Olsen is setting up an online journal, The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, which is expected to publish its first papers this summer. He hopes that this will overcome the difficulty of publishing studies that fail to prove hypotheses in some existing journals.

But other researchers say the attitude of journals is not the only reason for not publishing negative data. “Those [scientists] conducting the studies do not want to share them [negative data] ”, Scott Kern told The New York Times.

Kern started NOGO (Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology), which focuses on negative studies of gene mutations that might predispose to cancer. This, said Kern, received great support, but few submissions. Kern suspects this is because scientists are unwilling to share this information to their peers. “They now know something they're not going to do again and their competitor does not”, he said.