Yea, I can definitely see the selective reporting problem, which goes beyond the problem of negative results being unfairly denied publication. But to combat selective reporting, you’d really need to require preregistered experiments, which is more of a collective-action problem between journals, since if any of them allow un-preregistered experiments, the authors can just publish there. (Of course, you can try and convince the broad community to ignore all experiments that aren’t preregistered, but if you can do this then you’ve already won; the journals will be strongly incentivized to follow suit.)
Required preregistration is just very cumbersome and difficult to do for exploratory science; it really seems only feasible for the later stages of things like medical trials or big contentious question requiring a decisive experiment.
Yea, I can definitely see the selective reporting problem, which goes beyond the problem of negative results being unfairly denied publication. But to combat selective reporting, you’d really need to require preregistered experiments, which is more of a collective-action problem between journals, since if any of them allow un-preregistered experiments, the authors can just publish there. (Of course, you can try and convince the broad community to ignore all experiments that aren’t preregistered, but if you can do this then you’ve already won; the journals will be strongly incentivized to follow suit.)
Required preregistration is just very cumbersome and difficult to do for exploratory science; it really seems only feasible for the later stages of things like medical trials or big contentious question requiring a decisive experiment.