You've hit the nail on the head. The journal's impact factor would be pitifully low. But you're quite correct that having the information available would save a

You've hit the nail on the head. The journal's impact factor would be pitifully low. But you're quite correct that having the information available would save a great deal of time and money (and blood, sweat, tears, grief and anxiety). The ability to publish negative results would be tremendously useful for doctoral students. I mean, a tremendous amount of science is negative results and nothing about dissertation research guarantees that your hypothesis will be proven by your data. This would ease a lot of the angst caused by publication requirements for doctoral students and would give them phenomenal writing practice on fairly low stress publications. There's merit here, without a doubt, but it doesn't fit in to the established hierarchy of academic research which is a massive issue. I'm a firm believer is reform of academic research, but that's an entirely different discussion...