Wired on Dark Data (and Precedings)

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Hilary Spencer (group admin)

Date:

25 September 2007

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Thomas Goetz has a brief essay in this month’s issue (October) of Wired on what he calls ‘dark data’:

It’s Time to Free the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments

Goetz argues that the “vast body of squandered knowledge” produced by experiments that failed to produce the hoped for results needs to be shared. Nature Precedings is described as an “island of innovation”, along with the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine and JC Bradley’s open notebook science project (which he describes in a Precedings post)

Goetz’s article follows a blog post by his Wired colleague Brandon Keim:

Nature’s Controversial New Non-Journal: Bazaar, not Cathedral

Keim describes Precedings as a space for “not only unpublished manuscripts, but the assorted notes, presentations, white papers and other effluvia that would never appear in a journal, but could be useful for researchers” and “the wealth of scientific materials generated during research, of which peer-reviewed journal articles are only the iceberg’s tip”.

Since the launch of Nature Precedings, we’ve been encouraging researchers to submit manuscripts or posters describing negative or null results in addition to documents describing preliminary positive findings. Precedings is designed as a space for “pre-publication research”, which includes all pieces of research generated during the scientific process. Experiments that generated negative or null results are definitely part of this process.

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