[danaris]

I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish."

That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

[Ifkaluva]

Right :) I was trying to write the bleakest possible version, and in the bleakest, your own unpublished idea is not actually original, it’s just a failure of the system to record negative results.