[jprafael]

> I hate to say it, because that's not how science should work

I have the opposite view. Science should be incremental and authors should be incentivized to share their (interesting) findings early and often. This makes the community as whole move faster because you get more visibility, funding, man-hours dedicated to things that are on the leading edge of research. Consider a scenario where a researcher is required to explain exactly why some phenomenon happens. Maybe it took 1 year to find the original phenomenon and then it takes 10 years to explain it to a reasonable level. Everyone only gets the benefit of this research 11 years after. Now consider the opposite scenario. After 1 year the author publishes and gets the attention of fellow colleagues. Some of them will collaborate together adding more man-hours / year, reducing the total time. Some of them might have already discovered something similar and thus avoid all repeated work. Some of them might be better positioned to solve the explanation piece based on their field of expertise, personal interests, availability. All of this makes the innovation happen faster.

What you often see (or should see in high quality papers) is an hypothesis of why something happens. This in itself is valuable. Many hypotheses are unproven until today. If you assume that these hypotheses are true you'll often find better results or find them faster; and if you don't you have discovered something interesting to report on.

[psyklic]

I'm of the opposite view - publish only if you can prove it. If you reward half results, the field will be deluged with half truths. If someone publishes a hypothesis you're working on with only a half proof (and stands to gain the future credit), then there is little incentive to continue doing the work to prove it.

This was actually a major issue one of my PhD advisors had, since it led to poor foundations for the field with little incentive to ensure their validity.

[rdedev]

We need something in between. The paper author may not know why something is happening but has showed that it is statistically significant. Maybe he just does not have the context or background but someone else along the way. Of course the assumption is that people would do replication studies but no one is incentivized to do them so better to be on the safer side

[loveparade]

I don't think we disagree. All I am saying is that if your goal is to filter papers by their likelihood of having a useful result, the best signal is the author and their reputation, not necessarily the content (unless there is perhaps some obviously amazing demo). We don't disagree that for the community as a whole the system of publishing early and often is much better than the alternative of imposing restrictions.

[tpoacher]

This guys agree with you: https://www.octopus.ac/

Alas, whether their idea will withstand the current incentives structure in academia, remains to be seen.

[low_tech_love]

That works well only if people have no motivation to fabricate or embellish results, and/or if they fully share the code and experimental setup. But in general I agree.