by Chloé Schmidt

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution is excited to announce a new article type: Flop!

This announcement brought to you by “Your Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Team”.

Conscious of the importance of negative results and reproducibility to the greater scientific community, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution is debuting the Flop article type. Flops will take negative results a step further, and give researchers a distinct venue to publish non-results from failed experiments.

A complete article type description is below:

Flop

Flop articles describe the intended aims, study, methods, and mistakes of original research. Flop articles should be composed of Introduction, Methods, Discussion and Conclusions sections making sure to detail where it all went wrong. The Results of the research are not reported, as there are none. Flop articles may also report on the non-reproducibility of previously published results. Flop Articles are peer-reviewed, have a maximum word count of 3,000 and may include up to 2 Figures/Tables. Authors are required to pay a fee (A-type article) to publish a Flop Article.

April Fools, everyone!!