Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces,

To avoid the pursuit of unproductive paths, we report here what has not worked in our hands, as well as our progress developing a method to screen the most efficient electroporation parameters for optimal DNA delivery into Prochlorococcus cells

Con-servative strategies (15) serve individual careerswell but are less effective for science as a whole.Such strategies are amplified by the file drawerproblem (16): Negative results, at odds withestablished hypotheses, are rarely published,leadingto a systemic bias in published researchand the canonization of weak and sometimesfalse facts (17). More risky hypotheses may havebeen tested by generations of scientists, but onlythose successful enough to result in publicationsare known to us.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the effect,” he said. “But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published.

Why sully a CV with papers from the ‘Journal of Failed Experiments’? Don’t we want our colleagues (and especially our competitors) to believe that we succeed at every undertaking?

Thus, although the arguments in favor of small-unit publishing all seem to revolve around benefits to the community, the costs of generating these small units would fall on individual authors. If the community is to reap the benefits, then the costs to the individual authors must be driven to zero – or associated with some reward.

Time spent publishing small papers is time not spent developing big ones

but because journal editors are obsessively vigilant about rejecting papers that fall below a threshold of ‘novelty’, these papers become unpublishable in practical terms