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Today's chemistry publication system is organized around the concept of papers that meet certain standards. Among other criteria, the idea of utility plays an important role. To be more specific, ideas that don't "work" are typically not published. You'll never find such a statement in official editorial policies, but they exist nontheless. In most cases potential authors themselves self-censor their work, knowing the unwritten rules of the game. To the extent that negative results are reported at all, they tend to be minor components of a larger paper describing experiments that "worked" well.

This system evolved in a world in which space for the printed word was at a premium. There simply wasn't enough paper, ink, and shelf space to cost-effectively publish every research result that could be published.

Those days, of course, are long gone. The Web has made it practically free to publish anything on any subject. Strangely enough, the bias toward only publishing experimental results that "work" remains.

Enter The All Results Journals: Chemistry. From the website:

As we think that the awareness of secondary (or negative) results plays an important role in the advancement of science, The All Results Journals: Chemistry is born for recover [sic] and publish these valuable pieces of information in Chemical Science. These experiments should be taken into account as a vital key for the development of science. These “secondary” results are the catalyst for a real science-based empirical knowledge.

It's difficult to know how seriously to take this effort. The journal has published no papers yet. Nor have its sister journals in Biology and Physics. Will this idea make it over the unavoidable barrier to acceptance that almost certainly lies ahead? Only time will tell.

One of the problems with this idea will be with stigmatization. The idea that publication in a journal like All Results might reflect badly on you personally, your research group, or your institution. For this simple reason, it may be worth carefully selecting the title for such a new journal, and carefully avoiding anything suggestive of lower quality, lower standards, or lower prestige. It may in fact be advantageous to run it like any other journal, but with an explicit editorial policy of allowing (but not requiring) papers dedicated to negative results. Focus on creating a comprehensive resource on a given topic, not on whether the experiemental results matched researchers' expectations.

One thing is clear - the rules of publication in general have changed irreversibly. It's high time scientific publishers took this simple idea seriously and responded accordingly.