sigh...Do you want the short answer or the long version? The short answer is: peer pressure. The longer version requires a look back at the history of scienti

sigh...Do you want the short answer or the long version? The short answer is: peer pressure. The longer version requires a look back at the history of scientific publishing and how it's been perverted in more recent times. Originally, scientists (or natural philosophers as they were known then) would carry out experiments and record their findings in their personal papers. The problem with this is the question of priority: who discovered what first. If you leave this question up to individuals recording their own results, then there's nothing to stop those individuals from backdating their own writings in a false attempt to claim priority. So a tradition grew of communicating results via letters. When you discover something, don't just write it down, send it in a letter to a fellow natural philosopher. That gives you a (presumably) independent means of verifying priority. Of course, this does nothing to prevent two friends from colluding to falsely claim the mantel of priority. Eventually the tradition morphed. Instead of just writing a letter to a colleague, you would write the letter and the colleague would read it to a gathering of natural philosophers (or, if you had the means of travel, you could read your findings, or in some cases demonstrate them, to the gathering in person). This gives you a much more robust means of claiming priority. Eventually, these societies organized themselves, one of the earliest being the Royal Society. It didn't take long before these groups decided that all the letters being read should be recorded in some format. Thus, you have the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society", the first scientific journal... ...in 1665. Since then the enterprise of scientific publishing has changed very little. Why is this bit of history important? Because the point of the original journals was not to be a full record of the experiments being performed, but rather just of discoveries so that their priority could be established. The scientists of the time still communicated their efforts, both successful and not, with each other in myriad ways. Perhaps more importantly, positions at universities were often based on these personal communications (and recommendations from peers). Fast forward 400 or so years and scientific output (and indeed the number of scientists and universities producing this output) undergoes exponential growth. Suddenly, hiring professors based purely on personal communications becomes impractical. Ah, but what's this? There's also an exponential growth in scientific journals, and some candidates for these positions have their name on more by-lines than other candidates. Surely they must excel at science, no? In other words, scientific journals, which were originally just one part of a scientists work, were perverted to become a stand-in for all of a scientists work. Yet, owing to their history as a means of establishing priority for discovery, the papers published continued to be propelled by tradition to emphasize positive results. If a practice that has remained unchanged for 4 and a half centuries isn't ripe for disruption, I don't know what is!