Dark Matter of Science

A scientist sets out to show that a gene is linked to a disease and runs an experiment to prove it. But things don't work out as planned and results show that the gene has no connection to the disease. Scrap the results and head back to the lab? This is in fact what most researchers do; putting aside "negative" results in favor of results from experiments that show "positive" results. But are negative results any less valuable than positive ones?

Although what tends to be exciting in science are the conditions in which one entity affects another, the lack of affect can be useful in pointing a researcher away from an invalid model and toward a more accurate one. But if these negative results are not published or transferred to the scientific community there is nothing explicit to prevent other researchers from going down the same dead-end.

With the costs of publishing, both in labor and capital, can publishing negative results be justified? Many journals do not publish negative results per se, although many articles published with positive results may cite negative results that were encountered along the way. A handful of journals have recently been established for the sole purpose of publishing negative results. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, the Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology (NOGO), and the Journal of Negative Results Ecology & Evolutionary Biology are three in Biology. It's interesting to note that NOGO puts the cost of an average negative study at between $5,000 and $20,000 per gene investigated. This certainly provides economic incentive for publishing negative results.

As science moves into the informatics age where knowledge is more readily accessible and distributed, value differences between "positive" and "negative" results will undoubtedly diminish. Although no one will ever describe a negative result as a "breakthrough" no breakthrough has ever been achieved without its preceding dead-ends.

The Push for Open Access

James Boyle, professor of law at Duke and a founder of Science Commons, has recently written a piece in the Financial Times making a case for open access to publicly funded research results. Although pushing for legislation for public access to federally funded research, Boyle acknowledges that the bill will probably be vetoed by the current administration.

Boyle points out the irony of the situation; that the Web was originally developed by scientists to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. Yet, years after the Web has benefited so many other industries, science has yet to reap the benefits due in part because of the entrenched system in which scientific results are published.

As Web 2.0 technologies are sending their tendrils throughout the Web, connecting bits of information from one Web site with another, they come to a dead stop when encountering scientific information locked behind subscriber only gates of the academic journals. There is no doubt that these journals provide value in the scientific process, but with the advent of the Internet and the fundamental changes it has brought to knowledge dissemination, their value has begun to wane. Is there a successful business model that can provide publication services in an open access world? Absolutely, but not all journals may be able to make the change and there are risks involved, hence heavy resistance from the journal publishers.

And what will happen when the journal flood gates are finally opened? There is no doubt the day that a human could expect to read and process the volume of information required for an interdisciplinary research project is coming to an end and that this flood would spur a demand for more and better informatics tools. But combining the wealth of information with better informatics tools will certainly usher in a new era of scientific discovery.