A serendipitous discovery

The Breaking News section of the Fortean Times website had a link that caught my eye and my imagination.

The site announces a new online scientific journal that will be fully peer reviewed and will have open access
The new publication is to be called the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results. What better title could you ask for!

According to its mission statement “an important component of scientific discovery is a disciplined examination of research results that contradict or negate extant hypotheses. However, there is a distinct lack of a forum in which such results can be presented and discussed in any meaningful way. We believe a forum for and dialogue on serendipitous and unexpected results will provide valuable insight and inform modern research practices.

JSUR is an open-access journal that aims to provide such a forum, that is complementary to existing journals and conference venues. JSUR is primarily focused on recent research in the computational and life sciences, two burgeoning fields in which there is much to be gained by reporting, and providing a forum for understanding, discoveries that seem difficult to explain or that are surprising and contradictory to conventional wisdom.”

This sounds like fascinating stuff. I hope the articles will not be utterly incomprehensible to someone who last graced a lecture theatre in the early 1990s!