Science Journals Launch LESSONS to Publish Failures, Errors and Null Results

Some of the most valuable results in science never make it into print. Experiments that fail, models that misbehave, instruments that do not perform as advertised, and hypotheses that are carefully tested and rejected all vanish from the literature, leaving an incomplete and misleadingly rosy record of what the research community actually knows. A team of editors and researchers associated with the European Geosciences Union (EGU) has now taken a concrete step to change that. In an editorial published in the journal Geoscience Communication, they introduce a new article type called LESSONS, short for Limitations, Errors, Surprises, Shortcomings and Opportunities for New Science, which will appear in participating EGU publications and is designed to give non-positive results a permanent, visible and citable home.

The rationale behind the initiative rests on a well-documented structural problem in scholarly publishing. Positive results, meaning those that support a research hypothesis, are more likely to be written up, submitted and accepted than null or negative results. The authors of the editorial cite a broad body of evidence showing that this bias operates at every stage of the scientific process, from study design through data collection and analysis to interpretation, and that it can ultimately produce false positive findings. Because career progression and funding decisions reward publication counts and citation metrics, researchers have strong incentives to chase publishable, positive outcomes rather than to document the dead ends they encounter along the way.

The consequences of this bias are more than cosmetic. When errors and null results go unpublished, other scientists may repeat the same failed experiments, wasting time, effort and public resources. A widely used model may carry defects that are common knowledge inside the institute that developed it but invisible to external users of its output. A Springer Nature survey of roughly 11,000 researchers, cited in the editorial, found that only 15 percent of respondents were aware of journals that actively encourage the submission of null results, while 69 percent believed such results would not be accepted. Researchers, in other words, often do not know where to send the lessons they have learned, and so those lessons are shared only informally, in what the editorial describes as a body of knowledge that has only been shared at water coolers in academic hallways so far.

The new LESSONS format comes in two flavours. LESSONS Reports are short, peer-reviewed journal articles that follow the public peer review model used across EGU journals, in which reviews and author responses are published openly. They are deliberately constrained to roughly 1,000 to 2,000 words in the main text, with a commensurate number of figures, tables and references, a length intended to lower the barrier to submission in the same way as existing short formats such as Letters or Geoscience Communication Insights. LESSONS Posts, by contrast, are brief, non-peer-reviewed preprints of typically fewer than 500 words and a single figure, hosted on EGUsphere, the EGU’s interactive community platform. Posts are intended for early-stage reporting, to stimulate discussion or to attract co-authors for a fuller Report, and are checked only by an EGUsphere moderator for basic scientific quality and standards of civil discourse.

Both formats are collected in a new, ongoing interjournal compilation, which the editorial presents as a key design decision. Earlier attempts to publish failures have often foundered. The EGU journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences once ran a manuscript category called Black Swans and Scientific Falsifications, focused on unforeseen, high-impact events, but it was discontinued after several years without submissions. The editorial attributes that failure to a narrow scope, high expectations, availability in only a single journal and limited advertisement. Dedicated journals elsewhere have struggled too, with the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine discontinued and the Journal of Trial and Error operating outside the mainstream. By embedding LESSONS within established journals rather than launching a standalone venue, the EGU ensures that every contribution meets the same scientific standards as regular articles while gaining the visibility of a dedicated compilation.

The scope of the new article type is broad, and the editorial is careful to stress that the words in the LESSONS acronym are illustrative examples rather than exclusive categories. Errors, for instance, can include the misuse of a widely adopted method, such as a study showing that a commonly used 31-day running window introduces a bias into estimates of expected extreme frequency, or hardware that does not behave as its documentation promises, such as a comparison of 16 commercial solar regulators whose power consumption diverged substantially from manufacturers’ specifications. Limitations and shortcomings cover methods applied beyond their valid boundaries, poor calibration, and software bugs in community codes, provided the bug constitutes a genuine learning moment for many scientists.

Surprises form another rich vein. The editorial recounts how ecologists studying salt-marsh seedling establishment noticed ragworms pulling seedlings into the sediment, a chance observation that ultimately revealed the worms play a prominent role in seedling establishment and even garden their own food. In a similar spirit, researchers testing relationships between river discharge and plastic transport found their only strong correlation was with floating organic material, chiefly water hyacinths, which turned out to entangle plastic pollution so effectively that they can now be used strategically to extract plastics from rivers. Null results from carefully controlled studies also qualify, as do demonstrations of non-reproducibility after substantial effort, and so-called origin myths, in which authors trace how a widely used model, metric or method acquired a misunderstood or oversimplified history.

Quality control remains central. LESSONS Reports are held to the same criteria of scientific significance, quality and presentation as any other journal article: the theory must be sound, the methodology appropriate, the data properly analysed and the conclusions logically drawn. Crucially, the editorial insists that the quality of a study is separate from its results, so a null outcome does not in itself signal weak science. The insight must be novel, meaning not formally described in the literature before, and must offer a takeaway that can caution or benefit other researchers beyond the author’s own group. Entirely predictable errors or simple careless mistakes do not qualify, unless they are believed to be common in the community and a review would be useful. Reviewers are given specific guidance, including checking whether the failure could reasonably have been anticipated and whether others are likely to repeat the same approach.

The editorial also situates LESSONS within a wider movement to reform research assessment. The EGU has endorsed the declaration of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, which calls for moving beyond traditional publication and citation metrics, and the new article type aligns with the union’s existing commitment to transparency, exemplified by its public peer review model and mandatory documentation of manuscript histories. Unlike registered reports, which guarantee publication of negative results by reviewing study protocols before data are collected, LESSONS focuses specifically on the reporting of errors and lessons after the fact, a niche that pre-registration does not cover. The authors also argue that publishing failures can give long-overdue recognition to field researchers, who are more likely to generate null results, and to model developers who spend time finding and fixing bugs rather than chasing new short-term features.

Whether the initiative succeeds will depend on the community embracing it. The editorial points to sustained interest in dedicated EGU General Assembly sessions on failures, including the interdisciplinary BUGS session on Blunders, Unexpected Glitches and Surprises, which attracted 21 abstracts in 2025 and 25 in 2026, as evidence of appetite. The authors close with a direct appeal: submit a LESSONS article, take part in the public discussion on EGUsphere, and encourage local journals to join the compilation. If the format takes hold, the scientific record could become not only more honest but more useful, capturing the full arc of trial and error on which scientific progress actually depends, rather than only its triumphant final chapters.

Subject of Research: A new EGU article type for publishing non-positive results, errors and lessons learned in geoscience research

Article Title: Editorial: Introducing a new article type: Limitations, Errors, Surprises, Shortcomings and Opportunities for New Science (LESSONS)

Article References: Proske, U., Hillier, J., Gaillard, S., Blume, T., Queiroz Alves, E., Buiter, S., Carslaw, K. S., von Elverfeldt, K., van Emmerik, T. H. M., Ervens, B., Hut, R., Illingworth, S., Klotz, D., & Pyschik, J. (2026). Editorial: Introducing a new article type: Limitations, Errors, Surprises, Shortcomings and Opportunities for New Science (LESSONS). Geoscience Communication, 9(3), 371-383. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-371-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-371-2026

Keywords: LESSONS, EGU, publication bias, null results, open science, peer review, geoscience, scientific publishing, reproducibility, research integrity, EGUsphere, negative results