It could be useful to have a site where researchers could post their failed attempts at solving difficult problems, a sort of "Journal of Failed Ideas".
I saw this suggested in a reddit thread a while back, might've been the Bill Gates AMA, but the comment was something to the effect of, "What if cancer researchers could post things they've tried in some central location, without the overhead of publishing papers in a journal?"
This wouldn't have to only apply to researchers. I had a similar idea while ago for a site where motorcyclists could post how they got into an accident so that others could avoid the same fate, like an informal NTSB-style accident report.
The problem is the incentives are all wrong for reporting negative outcomes - basically you get no benefit, but it cost you time.
What would work would be to pay each researcher for every negative result they published and more importantly why the idea failed. Often the failure is caused by something minor that the researcher overlooked when doing the experiment initially - I have saved many a project in the pub, by just chatting informally with people about the problems they are having.
I saw this suggested in a reddit thread a while back, might've been the Bill Gates AMA, but the comment was something to the effect of, "What if cancer researchers could post things they've tried in some central location, without the overhead of publishing papers in a journal?"
This wouldn't have to only apply to researchers. I had a similar idea while ago for a site where motorcyclists could post how they got into an accident so that others could avoid the same fate, like an informal NTSB-style accident report.