[arupchak]

Another way to combat this is make it easier for people to publish data that goes against their hypothesis and still give them 'points' for it. Part of the problem in academic labs is that there is this race to publish papers to get more funding to publish more papers to get more funding and so on. If journals stopped treating data that goes against an initial hypothesis as 'bad data' there would be a incentive to still publish it, and ideally, prevent someone else from repeating the same experiment/hypothesis.

[thronemonkey]

The problem isn't just what journals will publish, its how funding is distributed: the modern NIH/NSF grant process gives money for likelihood of producing positive results, which might sounds reasonable on the surface but which leads to perverse incentives like these.