I was speaking with a chemical engineer, who mentioned research that had been done that surfaced some helpful information - but the data did not culminate into anything deeply useful. What was discovered would help researchers know which roads not to take in making particular materials, but did not result in a successful final product, so it was left to languish. She mentioned that there is a journal that publishes unreproducible results. The name of most scientific games is to find results that may be reproduced by someone else under similar circumstances. Wouldn't it be cool to start a journal for those studies that may have not resulted in finalized products but rather in all sorts of dead ends? That way, other people could be saved time and energy. However, the initial researchers would have their names saddled with the crummy results and dead ends, and if an intrepid colleague found some useful information, they would profit off the findings. We played out this idea to a dead end.

Then, I attended a presentation about the Web 2.0 on campus. And Dr. M.W. spoke of the possibility of having an online site for anthropologists where they may read each other's preliminary papers and have a popularity approach (something like "dig" or "bury" a work from the digg.com site) by practicing individuals in the field. A work would then be published based on its popularity. Dr. M.W. said that he had a better sense of humanity after seeing their collaborations and cooperation in online spaces.

Such social sites may offer academia some promising collaborations, but I've seldom seen any academic go live with anything that may compromise competitive advantage. There's enough scuffling over ideas much less something that may be patented or copyrighted to an instructor's (and his/ her institution of higher education's) glory / fame / funding / reputation.

Still there's something very tempting about this idea of gleeful sharing.