<story><title>No publication without confirmation</title><url>http://www.nature.com/news/no-publication-without-confirmation-1.21509</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beloch</author><text>&amp;quot;Confirmatory labs would be less dependent on positive results than the original researchers, a situation that should promote the publication of null and negative results. They would be rewarded by authorship on published papers, service fees, or both. They would also be more motivated to build a reputation for quality and competence than to achieve a particular finding.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Sounds great, but how would this &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; work.  Nobody is going to get juicy grants from existing funding agencies for being a &amp;quot;confirmatory&amp;quot; lab.  Nature sure as hell isn&amp;#x27;t going to pay for this.  Most researchers probably can&amp;#x27;t afford to pay an outside lab to duplicate their research.  Is Nature going to suddenly start refusing papers whose results haven&amp;#x27;t been reproduced elsewhere?  That&amp;#x27;s basically suicide for their journal because researchers are frequently in a race with other researchers to publish first, so why publish with a journal that requires you to double your budget to pay a confirmatory lab and wait months or years for them to do the job?  The pressure will be intense to publish &lt;i&gt;elsewhere&lt;/i&gt; first.&lt;p&gt;I have a simpler solution.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t just slap the names of confirmatory lab authors onto other papers.  Publish original papers &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; publish confirmatory papers with equal prominence to the original papers. Hell, devote a portion of Nature to doing &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; that.  Currently, if you want to publish a paper about confirming someone &lt;i&gt;else&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; original findings, not even a third rate journal will touch it unless  you put at least &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; kind of novel-sounding spin on it.  Nature should use all that scummy impact factor gaming they do to make confirmatory papers &lt;i&gt;respectable&lt;/i&gt;.  Only when the work of reproducing results gains labs respect will funding agencies start supporting &amp;quot;confirmation labs&amp;quot;.  At present, such &amp;quot;unoriginal&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; work is not respected at all, and Nature is a big part of the reason why.</text></comment>
<story><title>No publication without confirmation</title><url>http://www.nature.com/news/no-publication-without-confirmation-1.21509</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>StClaire</author><text>I have an idea: if a research study doesn&amp;#x27;t go the way you thought it would, put it out there.&lt;p&gt;We need a central repository like Arxiv where we dump the experiments that didn&amp;#x27;t work out so that we can quickly compare a &amp;quot;successful&amp;quot; one to ones done before. That gives us a better idea of if the data is just a fluke.&lt;p&gt;The papers wouldn&amp;#x27;t have to be super involved. What did you do? What were statistical conclusions. Give an upper-level undergraduate or an early masters student some experience writing up a procedure. Shouldn&amp;#x27;t take more than a couple hours but it could save a lot of time dealing with publication bias</text></comment>