Phase 2: a record of what's been tried
A quick, citable home for the results that rarely become a paper: disappointing and unexciting nulls, modest positive results, and approaches tried and dropped. The field can see what has been tried and who tried it. Built on open repositories that already exist.
High-profile journals mostly publish the exciting results: positive ones, and nulls that refute a prominent claim. Some of the middle reaches specialist journals, and much of it never becomes a paper: the disappointing null, the unexciting null, the modest positive result, the approach tried and dropped. Some of it gets said at conferences or over coffee, but it rarely becomes something anyone can find later.
How much is lost hasn't been measured in condensed matter. In one set of 221 social science experiments, strong results were 60 percentage points more likely than null results to be written up at all. Phase 2 is a quick way to record the rest, so the field can see what has been tried, what has been explored and who tried it.1
How it works
- A short note, written with the assistant in minutes: what was tried, under what conditions, and what happened.
- An effort level, from a quick try to months or years of work, with how many samples or devices and their quality.
- Tags the assistant fills in: material, device, technique, conditions and outcome.
- Data attached if the lab wants, often already packaged in phase 1.
- The lab chooses who sees it: private, named collaborators, public, or public after an embargo.
- Each note names who did the work and gets a DOI, so it can be found and cited.
The effort level matters because a note could wrongly bury an idea: a quick try on a poor sample isn't evidence that an effect isn't there. Often the write-up shows it, since a few lines read differently from a detailed report, but a tag makes it explicit and searchable.
Built on what exists
Rather than a new database, phase 2 adds a condensed matter layer for tagging and search on top of open repositories that already issue DOIs and hold data. Zenodo registers a DOI for every upload, and NOMAD, built for materials data, already lets uploads be shared with reviewers, embargoed and frozen once published. Everything stays open source.2,3
Why it matters
Much of the barrier is effort, not competition: the leading reasons scientists give for not sharing data are lack of time and funding. And failed results have value: in chemistry, failed reactions kept in lab notebooks trained a model that predicted successful syntheses better than the chemists who ran them.4,5
Optional: a log of every run
Labs that want to can go further and log every run as it happens, failed ones included, to a shared record. Why a lab would want it: nothing is lost when a student leaves, methods and figures are easier to write, the assistant can count the devices measured instead of asking, and the count of devices measured rests on a time-stamped record rather than memory.