Eve Marder on owning your mistakes→

In another example, one of my PhD students recently failed to replicate some of our previously published observations, for reasons we still don't fully understand. This was obviously painful, but we published the most complete description of the new data and our best assessment of what could be responsible for the discrepancy (including the possibility that our wild-caught crab populations are affected by climate change). Ironically, the first version of the manuscript was rejected (not by eLife) because a reviewer said we shouldn't be allowed to publish something that disagreed with our own prior observations!