Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine

The Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine is an open access journal publishing negative data sets, that encourage discussions on ambiguous, unanticipated or provocative results with regard to currently accepted concepts. 
Thereby, the journal wants to challenge present scientific models and dogmas. In particular, the publication of work demonstrating that standard methods and techniques are sometimes inapplicable to some studies is of a great advantage to other researchers in their respective fields. Also, scientists and physicians are invited to publish clinical trials that do not show a higher efficacy in therapy than current treatments. This can eventually lead to the improvement of experimental design and treatment strategies.
As traditional journals infrequently publish negative studies, valuable information often becomes inaccessible to other researchers to evaluate and analyze. In particular, negative or controversial results contradicting prevalent theories aren't easily published - although they might be innovative.
Of course, not all null results and controversial data would necessarily be groundbreaking. In short, the journal believes that the publication of such results is an important influence on the scientific community to consider and improvise upon in their own research.

Check this out: http://www.jnrbm.com/

by Nicole Hentschel
This article originally appeared on June 1, 2011 in  Volume 4 - Issue 2, "Good Scientific Practice"

The Journal of Unsolved Questions (JUnQ)

PhD students from the Graduate school of Material Science (MAINZ) launched a scientific journal to publish negative results.
In the journal of Unsolved Questions (JUnQ), scientific projects gain interest that would never be published in traditional scientific journals: those with negative or inconclusive results. As most of the research projects fail to show positive results with clear conclusions, many results are not published. Accordingly, a lot of information is not available to the scientific community and gets lost.
This Journal provides a platform to exchange data on projects which did not work and are unfinished. Thereby, JUnQ wants to establish the publication of negative results as an important milestone for scientific communication especially among different disciplines to overcome biases and fraud. In addition to these articles, JUnQ also publishes short essays about open scientific questions which have not been solved yet but are important to the science community. According to good scientific practice, the articles are peer-reviewed by independent referees of the respective scientific field. Furthermore, the essays about open questions will be broadly reviewed in order to only publish scientific questions that do not contain false facts.

PUBLICATION OF NEGATIVE DATA AS AN IMPORTANT MILESTONE

Beyond that, JunQ wants to reflect about the day-to-day business in science from a meta-perspective. This will be achieved through different formats. Thus, this summer semester, JUnQ organized a lecture series with the topic "Publish or Perish...?" which discusses the influence of prevalent publication practices in natural sciences.
The first issue of JUnQ was published on January,1^st, 2011 and contained two articles and 4 open questions. To get a copy and more information about JUnQ, go to http://junq.info. Articles and Open Questions can be submitted to JUnQ@uni-mainz.de.

by Nicole Hentschel
This article originally appeared on June 1, 2011 in  Volume 4 - Issue 2, "Good Scientific Practice"

Of the Importance to Publish Negative Results

I had a rough time during my PhD with many experiments that did not support a common hypothesis in my field of research. However, I was able to successfully submit a manuscript describing my negative data. Recently I even won a prize for publishing them.

When scientists embark on a new study, they formulate a hypothesis that they want to test. Sometimes the experiments do not support the hypothesis the researchers set out to test. If the obtained data are unable to confirm a hypothesis or replicate previous results, they are called negative results. Sometimes they are also called NULL results, as the Null hypothesis H₀ (the hypothesis that there will be no difference between experimental and control group) was not rejected. Most of the time, negative results are more accurate and give more informative than results that support a new hypothesis. 

If a test of experimental data comes up significant with p < 0.05, we reject H₀ and accept H₁ (the hypothesis that the results show an effect). Notably, we only tested H₀ and the p-value says nothing about the probability of H₁ being true. However, a non-significant p-value means that H₀ is true (or the data didn’t have enough power to reject it). In a Bayesian sense, data underlying a non-significant p-value can be strong evidence for the H₀. 

Negative data are obviously not very spectacular, because we want to find out what is true, not what isn’t. Positive results seem more interesting and more important than NULL results. The latter are often not submitted for publication, because they are believed to generate less value to scientists and academic publishers. Indeed, they are less likely to open new avenues of research that generate funding opportunities. Manuscripts reporting negative data are also more likely to get rejected, because they appear less exciting. Traditionally it is difficult to publish negative data, unless they refute a spectacular claim. Studies that do not confirm a new hypothesis often get literally filed away in a drawer. Therefore this is also called the “file drawer phenomenon”.

PUBLISH ALL RESULTS TO FIGHT THE PUBLICATION BIAS! 

Unfortunately, the negative data get lost to the scientific community. If ever another group of researchers has a similar hypothesis, they are likely to tap into the same dead end. The fact that such negative data are rarely published, leads other scientists to waste time and effort by unnecessarily repeating experiments. It is estimated [1] that this costs the US economy alone, $28bn each year, similar in scale to the total $35bn National Institute of Health annual budget [2]. Moreover, the bias towards positive results can lead to an overestimation of biological phenomena or efficacy of drugs. It is devastating and frustrating, if the biased representation of preclinical work compromises the outcome of drug trials. Thus, publishing more negative results will have a positive impact on the development of new drugs and healthcare solutions. 

by Maklay 62 via pixabay

Another current problem is reproducibility. Even though it is fundamental to scientific progress, replication of studies carries little prestige in academic research. Especially in neuroscience, reproducibility has come under particular focus due to some spectacular cases, where data could not be reproduced [3]. Recently, systematic studies demonstrated that current biomedicine has a serious replication problem. It is shocking that more than half of the published biomedical data could not be reproduced [1]. This led to the declaration of a reproducibility crisis. It is necessary to value the effort to reproduce and publish studies regardless of their outcome.

 SCIENCE IS MOST EFFECTIVE WHEN BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE RESULTS ARE PUBLISHED

Fortunately, many journals now publish reproduction studies and negative data; for example PeerJ, PlosONE, J Neg Res Biomed, Scientific reports and others. Furthermore the necessity to reproduce experiments and publish negative results gets now also recognized by funding agencies that award publications that do not confirm the expected outcome or original hypothesis. The prizes aim to emphasize the value in publishing all the results, as science is most effective when both positive and negative results are published. Another way to fight publication bias and focus on the scientific process and soundness are “Registered Reports”. For this type of journal article, methods and proposed analyses are pre-registered prior to research being conducted. Thereby the results are accepted for publication before data collection commences and without regard to their positive or negative outcome.  
These efforts show, that the recognition to publish negative results and replication studies is growing. Hopefully this will contribute to the soundness of science and retrieve research from the reproducibility crisis.

QUEST is giving away 15 awards of € 1,000  to first/last/corresponding authors (BIH, MDC or Charité affiliation) of preclinical or clinical research papers in which the main result is a NULL or ‘negative’ or in which the replication of own results or the results of others is attempted. Futher information can be found here.

The ECNP’s Preclinical Data Forum created the “ECNP Preclinical Network Data Prize”, a prize for published “negative” scientific results, of €10,000. Aimed initially at neuroscience research, it encourages publication of data where the results do not confirm the expected outcome or original hypothesis. The ECNP’s Preclinical Data Forum is a mixed industry and academic group which aims to improve the replicability and reliability of scientific data, especially in drug development. Futher information can be found here.

by Claudia Willmes, PhD Alumna AG Eickholt / AG Schmitz  

[1] sciencemag, 2015 http://bit.ly/2E5ho01
[2  sciencemag, 2017 http://bit.ly/2uWuFTt
[3] nature news, 2014 http://go.nature.com/2rAME4b

ENCODS 2016: An Insight Into the Publishing Process

ENCODS 2017 will also offer a number of workshops. One of our students attended the "Publishing Process" workshop last year:

The ENCODS 2016 program contained inspiring keynote lectures from various neuroscience fields, interesting talks by PhD students, lunch poster sessions, various workshops to choose from and offered, last but not least, a great opportunity to meet fellow students from 35 different countries. 

Publishing in a Top Journal
An especially interesting part of the program was the workshop “The Publishing Process” held by Alexander Arguello, Associate Editor of Nature Neuroscience. He gave us a professional insight into the processes of publishing and editing and was ready to discuss associated problems. He opened the workshop with a brief history of scientific publication and then explained the editing process at Nature Neuroscience, which is coordinated by eight editors. They receive and evaluate altogether about 250 papers per month and decide on rejection or review – at the end of this process, approximately 10% of the submitted articles are accepted. Besides considering the interest of the article for the typical reader of the journal, the assessment is mainly based on the abstract, focusing on clarity, novelty, scientific benefit and a plausible concept of the study. 

Good data visualization is key

Considerable focus is also placed on graphs and pictures, which should clearly convey the message of the paper without needing the actual text – nice images are always a plus! In the end, each editor alone, sometimes after consultation with his or her colleagues, has the final say on whether a paper goes into review or is sent back to the author. We concluded this part of the workshop by evaluating various abstracts that had actually once been sent to Nature Neuroscience for their chance to be published. This was not always easy to do at first glance!

Do We Still Need Printed Journals?
During the course of the workshop, we also discussed the problems and advantages of printed journals versus open access options. As more and more papers are published every year, it is hard and time-consuming to decide which articles are worth reading, especially if they are outside one's own research focus. Printed journals can serve as a “filter” and provide a selection of important articles. However, as they are intended to reach a broader audience (and pursue financial interests), they tend to follow certain trends, as is currently happening with the Zika virus or CRISPR. Moreover, especially widely read journals such as Nature do not always succeed in identifying revolutionary, paradigm-shifting ideas. In fact, those are often published in smaller journals – so don’t feel bad if your paper doesn’t make it into Nature!

 Printed journals tend to follow fads

The majority of the workshop participants were in favor of open access publishing, as it seems to make scientific results more transparent and can provide a platform for constructive discussion. Nonetheless, there is a certain danger of false data interpretation that might lead to a misunderstanding of scientific results by non-experts. A solution to this problem might be a database only open to experts from a particular field of science. 

Scientific Journal Editor As a Job Option
For those who are still undecided whether or not to stay in research after finishing their PhD, it might be worthwhile to know that being an editor in a scientific journal is actually a realistic job option. The work as an editor at Nature Neuroscience consists not only of the above mentioned tasks, but also of travelling to various conferences to keep up with the latest developments in science. So, if you are looking for a job without all the worries about grants, funding and temporary contracts this might be a career option for you. Just go to the website of your favourite journal to check for open positions!

by Anna Pfeffer, PhD Student AG Steiner
This article originally appeared in September 2016 in "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro"