With an analogy to open-source, my failed projects (like we're talking about here) fall largely into two distinct categories. Those that I never started, or were totally half-baked, or turned out to trivial - the uninteresting or incomplete. 90%. And 5% turn out to be illustrative learning moments.
One of my first OOP projects trying to model the real world in hierarchical classes. It was a good non-contrived example of a need for multiple orthogonal inheritance methods as any one can easily be forced into contortions in modeling even simple structures.
I tried to write a project with my own trig implementations, just because. That'd at least be funny...
But the rest are a few lines of drunk-coding, or something I found a library to do and never developed, or in some other way a waste of time to look at.
So I don't want to hold scientists to standards I wouldn't want. Nor do I want to miss the value in the noise.
So maybe we should have a honor-system somewhat like this - when you first describe to project to anyone looking for funding, or discussed it with more than a handful of peers, or ... then you make a note in your lab book. "Research direction: see if flatworms are really flat because Y - hope it'll give insight into Z". And your internal audit system submits all of these to a pool of peers who pick by interest in the area. If it's chosen, an auditor checks if the idea was ever really developed, dropping it if not, and summarizing whatever is there (or letting you write a paper) if there are results.
It sounds like a lot of work, but considering that everyone is asking for grants and being audited anyways, and this would replace vast swaths of less-pointed simple bookkeeping audit with peer-review of your methods, etc. In other words, likely higher quality results for the funding bodies in less time, and with the additional benefit of being able to publish interesting failure results.
Thus achieving a balance between researcher privacy and ability to try without public mockery on failure, funding efficiency, and scientific benefit.
One of my first OOP projects trying to model the real world in hierarchical classes. It was a good non-contrived example of a need for multiple orthogonal inheritance methods as any one can easily be forced into contortions in modeling even simple structures.
I tried to write a project with my own trig implementations, just because. That'd at least be funny...
But the rest are a few lines of drunk-coding, or something I found a library to do and never developed, or in some other way a waste of time to look at.
So I don't want to hold scientists to standards I wouldn't want. Nor do I want to miss the value in the noise.
So maybe we should have a honor-system somewhat like this - when you first describe to project to anyone looking for funding, or discussed it with more than a handful of peers, or ... then you make a note in your lab book. "Research direction: see if flatworms are really flat because Y - hope it'll give insight into Z". And your internal audit system submits all of these to a pool of peers who pick by interest in the area. If it's chosen, an auditor checks if the idea was ever really developed, dropping it if not, and summarizing whatever is there (or letting you write a paper) if there are results.
It sounds like a lot of work, but considering that everyone is asking for grants and being audited anyways, and this would replace vast swaths of less-pointed simple bookkeeping audit with peer-review of your methods, etc. In other words, likely higher quality results for the funding bodies in less time, and with the additional benefit of being able to publish interesting failure results.
Thus achieving a balance between researcher privacy and ability to try without public mockery on failure, funding efficiency, and scientific benefit.