Falsified, plagiarized or plain junk research is not considered here. The effort of the author and the cost to the funders are considered sunk and similarly ignored.

After a research article is published, it may still have negative value for humanity. How is this possible if the cost of creating it is considered zero and the results are not junk? Doesn’t every discovery, however small, contribute a little to the corpus of knowledge? It does, but the cost it imposes on other researchers may outweigh this. Every publication increases the number of articles that researchers of related topics have to look at, however briefly, to write their literature review and check that their idea is not already taken. It may take a few seconds to read the title and decide that the article is irrelevant to one’s work, but this small cost is paid by many. If the publication makes a small enough contribution to knowledge, then the total cost to other academics outweighs the benefit from this contribution. The researchers whose time the article wasted could have done something useful with that time.