> You do an experiment, you look at the results. They fail to confirm the hypothesis. But if you tweak the hypothesis just a little, the data suddenly confirm it. So why not publish the tweaked version?
If between tweaking the hypothesis and publishing it, you add the step "you perform another experiment which tests the tweaked hypothesis", you have just described the scientific method.
I'm sure the budget for this new experiment will be given straight away, no questions asked.
Though of course, there's a difference between "drug A doesn't work for condition B but seems to work slightly for C" and "drug A doesn't work for condition B but 10 of 12 individuals with condition C have shown significant improvement"
> I'm sure the budget for this new experiment will be given straight away, no questions asked.
Most of the cases: yes, although your example of clinical trials is slightly different, and in that case, I do think the data should be publicly available to other researchers even in the case of a null.
If the original experiment was large enough [1], you could almost always find some C such that "drug A doesn't work for condition B but 90% [2] of individuals with condition C showed significant improvement".
In fact, you could replace [2] by a number arbitrarily close to 100% by increasing [1] accordingly.
If the original experiment was large enough to do that, then somebody was given way too much money for the original experiment. So I'd expect that's a very rare case.
If between tweaking the hypothesis and publishing it, you add the step "you perform another experiment which tests the tweaked hypothesis", you have just described the scientific method.