They avoid mentioning the elephant in the room: jobs and tenure. When you can get hired for a tenure-track job based on your null-result publications, and can get tenure for your null-result publications, then people will publish null results. Until then, they won't hit the mainstream.

It's fascinating how utterly dominated science is by economics. Even truth itself needs an angle.

There are a few different realities here. First, it's not really whether you can get tenure with the publications, because almost none of the major respected journals accept simple null/negative results for publication. It's too "boring". Now, they do occasionally publish "surprising" null/negative results, but that's usually do to rivalry or scandal.

The counter example to some extent is medical/drug control trials, but those are pharma driven, and gov published though an academic could be on the paper, and it might find its way onto a tenure review.

Second, in the beginning there is funding. If you don't have a grant for it, you don't do the research. Most grants are for "discoveries" and those only come about from "positive" scientific results. So the first path to this is to pay people to run the experiments (that nobody wants to see "fail"). Then, you have to trust that the people running them don't screw up the actual experiment, because there are an almost infinite number of ways to do things wrong, and only experts can even make things work at all for difficult modern science. Then you hope that the statistics are done well and not skewed, and hope a major journal publishes.

Third, could a Journal of Negative Results that only published well run experiments, by respected experts, with good statistics and minimal bias be profitable? I don't know, a few exist, but I think it would take government or charity to get it off the ground, and a few big names to get people reading it for prestige. Otherwise, we're just talking about something on par with arXiv.org. It can't just be a journal that publishes every negative result or somehow reviewers have to experts in everything, since properly reviewing negative results from many fields is a HUGE challenge.

My experience writing, and getting grants/research funded, is that there's a lot of bootstrapping where you use some initial funding to do research on some interesting topics and get some initial results, before you then propose to "do" that research (which you have high confidence will succeed) so that you can get funding to finish the next phase of research (and confirm the original work) to get the next grant. It's a cycle, and you don't dare break it, because if you "fail" to get "good" results from your research, and you don't get published, then your proposals for the next set of grants will be viewed very negatively!

This. And the incentives can be even more perverse: If you find a null result you might not want to let your competitors know, because they'll get stuck in the same sand trap.

If people are so interested, they'd presumably read and cite null-result publications, and their authors would get the same boons as if having published a positive result.

There's some issues, though. Firstly, how do you enforce citing negative results? In the case of positive results, reviewers can ask that work be cited if it had already introduced things present in the article. This is because a publication is a claim to originality.

But how do you define originality in not following a given approach? Anyone can not have the idea of doing something. You can't well cite all the paths not followed in your work, considering you might not even be aware of a negative result publication regarding these ideas you discarded or didn't have. Bibliography is time consuming enough as it is, without having to also cite all things irrelevant.

Another issue is that the effort to write an article and get it published and, on the other side, to review it, makes it hard to justify publishing negative results. I'd say an issue is rather that many positive results are already not getting published... There's a lot of informal knowledge, as people don't have time to write 100 page papers with all the tricks and details regularly, nor reviewers to read them.

Also, I could see a larger acceptance of negative result publications bringing perverse incentives. Currently, you have to get somewhere eventually. If negative results become legitimate publications, what would e.g. PhD theses become? Oh, we tried to reinvent everything but nothing worked, here's 200 pages of negative results no-one would have reasonably tried anyways. While the current state of affairs favours incremental research, I think that is still better than no serious research at all.