[ggcdn]

Maybe instead of full-fledged journal model, negative results should be published in a short (few pages) failure report. This addresses at least a few of the points you highlight. Skip all the cruft: here’s what we tried to do, here’s our methodology, and here’s the result.

Then these could be classified by methodology/process/chemicals/etc for people to look up before starting their research.

[wenc]

Yes, sounds like that could work. Like a wikipedia of experiments tried, with contact details and a public discussion forum for anyone interested in going deeper into the results.

In many fields, you can generally tell if someone is faking it about from how they respond and what they say. It's not that easy to fake specialized knowledge. This will help increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

The trick is to bootstrap a high-quality community, where top people in the field will want to engage. MathOverflow managed to do this for pure math. Quora on the other hand used to be good in the early days (many SV names) but has struggled to maintain quality. There's also the problem of moderating professional rivalry and reputation-maintenance in academia -- these are non-trivial issues in some smaller fields.