[missosoup]

In a vacuum yes. In the world of academia and its perverse incentives, no.

Publishing something that goes against the grain means a lot more scrutiny on your work and bigger humiliation for any mistakes made. If you're publishing against the grain, you have to double triple check every single detail to make sure it's all iron-clad. This costs a lot of additional time and money. When publishing research that preaches to the choir, no such considerations are required.

In an ideal world, publishing against the grain should be encouraged and there should be no extra reputational penalty for getting caught with errors in that type of research (heaps of errors go unnoticed in mainstream papers, even popular ones). But that's not how it works sadly.

[jschwartzi]

Really academia needs a way to request comment on an experimental procedure without requiring results or conclusions. Then you could publish negative or questionable results and seek speculation from other researchers.

[ridaj]

It does: for example, as djaque's comment points out, in their case this was published at conference proceeding. And of course advice can be sought in private as well.

[djaque]

Yes, exactly. I also gave an invited talk about it at the largest domestic conference in my field. This is kind of unusual for a grad. student which should give you an idea of how unique the problem is. We actually received good advice about our experiment that we might try later. The issue is just how niche what I study is. There's probably less than 10 experts in the world on the specific problem I was tackling.

[vageli]

> Really academia needs a way to request comment on an experimental procedure without requiring results or conclusions. Then you could publish negative or questionable results and seek speculation from other researchers.

I feel like anonymity could possibly go a long way for this.