Reading through this thread, I'm struck by the idea that "months of negotiations" to work out a proper protocol is some tactic by JREF to put off potential testees.
I'm a biologist. When I submit a research article (a paper describing some recent, novel, and hopefully important research I've carried out) to a journal for publication, it is farmed out for outside review by several other researchers. They then comment on its quality and recommend to the publication's editor that is be accepted, rejected, or sent back for additional experiments to test things I may have missed, but which they think are important. The third result is the most common.
This entire "negotiation" can takes months and months, at the end of which I will send the revised research in again, and the editor can review it and see if I've done the correct additional work to meet the bar set by those reviewers.
I am, nonetheless, not "put off" by this effort, or the time spent. After all, I've achieved my results in controlled testing in my own research environment, and I am confident of them, and of their importance and their need to be communicated to the rest of the world. If my peers say they want a few more tests, I'm okay with spending the time to do those tests and resubmit the research.
...and that's for a research paper where there's a good chance I'll be paying a thousand bucks in publication fees because academic journals have tight margins. If I were standing to pick up a flat million dollars, I'd be happy to spend years negotiating a proper protocol (although I'd hope, as a scientist, to be able to come up with one much, much faster than that). I mean, unless you're already independently wealthy, how does a million stack up against your annual salary? Surely it's worth the time spent on sporadic emails and forum posts for a couple months leading up to the test.
I'm a biologist. When I submit a research article (a paper describing some recent, novel, and hopefully important research I've carried out) to a journal for publication, it is farmed out for outside review by several other researchers. They then comment on its quality and recommend to the publication's editor that is be accepted, rejected, or sent back for additional experiments to test things I may have missed, but which they think are important. The third result is the most common.
This entire "negotiation" can takes months and months, at the end of which I will send the revised research in again, and the editor can review it and see if I've done the correct additional work to meet the bar set by those reviewers.
I am, nonetheless, not "put off" by this effort, or the time spent. After all, I've achieved my results in controlled testing in my own research environment, and I am confident of them, and of their importance and their need to be communicated to the rest of the world. If my peers say they want a few more tests, I'm okay with spending the time to do those tests and resubmit the research.
...and that's for a research paper where there's a good chance I'll be paying a thousand bucks in publication fees because academic journals have tight margins. If I were standing to pick up a flat million dollars, I'd be happy to spend years negotiating a proper protocol (although I'd hope, as a scientist, to be able to come up with one much, much faster than that). I mean, unless you're already independently wealthy, how does a million stack up against your annual salary? Surely it's worth the time spent on sporadic emails and forum posts for a couple months leading up to the test.
