"Quality research is quality research - regardless of the results it garners." Not true. Research with a negative outcome is less valuable. It creates less k

"Quality research is quality research - regardless of the results it garners." Not true. Research with a negative outcome is less valuable. It creates less knowledge, because there are many more negative statements you can say about how things work than positive statements. Negative statements are more trivial than "vital." Failed research projects are a combination of bad luck and bad planning, and you can't separate out these components. Even if more failed projects are published (further stressing the peer-review system), nobody's going to get a job based on a failed experiment. And what evidence do you have that this is a problem? Or that this is more of a problem than before? Even if so, "a massive re-haul on the way we treat research" is not the solution; better networking would be enough to avoid duplicated efforts.