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Question for physicists and astronomers, and maybe mathematicians!
My super hip postdoc friend and I were talking about research ethics the other day, and lamenting the lack of a good way for psychologists to deal with null results -- we can't publish them, so we're stuck either making revisions to the study until it "works" (which is kind of sketchy), or abandoning the research question, presumably leaving that juicy plum to whichever lab is lucky enough to get a false positive result. ;P We thought it'd be nice to have a database where people could post Stuff that Didn't Work. But![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
littlepurple counters that nobody would contribute to it, because nobody wants to "tip their hand" on the questions they're working on and the methods they're using to get there, not before stuff is published. Hmm.
Now, I know that astrophysicists and such post their work in arXiv, sometimes before formal publication elsewhere (right?). How does intellectual property work here? -- that's what we're really talking about, after all: being able to prove that the cool idea was yours first. Do people ever publish stuff with holes on arXiv, and then get scooped in print by someone who figured out how to fill the holes? Or is that not a sensible question in your field? I'm very curious about this -- a good chunk of my irritation with my current career track has to do with this problem and I'd love to figure out a good fix.
My super hip postdoc friend and I were talking about research ethics the other day, and lamenting the lack of a good way for psychologists to deal with null results -- we can't publish them, so we're stuck either making revisions to the study until it "works" (which is kind of sketchy), or abandoning the research question, presumably leaving that juicy plum to whichever lab is lucky enough to get a false positive result. ;P We thought it'd be nice to have a database where people could post Stuff that Didn't Work. But
littlepurple counters that nobody would contribute to it, because nobody wants to "tip their hand" on the questions they're working on and the methods they're using to get there, not before stuff is published. Hmm.Now, I know that astrophysicists and such post their work in arXiv, sometimes before formal publication elsewhere (right?). How does intellectual property work here? -- that's what we're really talking about, after all: being able to prove that the cool idea was yours first. Do people ever publish stuff with holes on arXiv, and then get scooped in print by someone who figured out how to fill the holes? Or is that not a sensible question in your field? I'm very curious about this -- a good chunk of my irritation with my current career track has to do with this problem and I'd love to figure out a good fix.
