[pjschlic]

This sounds like a great case for publishing negative results: it will result in meta-analysis about what practices routinely cause bad results and then those papers will be used to reduce the number of bad results. Labs keeping secrets in how to do research seems like a bug not a feature.

That's just the externalities around publishing negative results. The major reason being that it will tell people where the minefields are, resulting in people not all reproducing the same negative results.