Why is so much nutrition research kept confidential before publication?

     A specific example of how nutrition research is kept hidden until publication comes from a recent conference that I organized at Tufts, called GlobalFood+.  This event was designed around 7-minute speed talks designed for sharing on the internet — but one of the best talks had to be kept off our website.

     Confidentiality of work in progress can be important to prevent theft of ideas, to ensure that scientists receive credit for what they do.  Limiting prior publication might also be important for subscription-based journals, to ensure that institutional libraries want that journal in their collection.  But neither rationale applies when working papers can be cited, and when publication fees are paid for open-access articles.

     In general, the primary reason to discourage prior sharing is to pursue media coverage.  Journal publishers make this clear, as in the statements against ‘pre-publicity’ at the top general outlets, Nature and Science.  Previous posting is especially discouraged in the top medical journals, as explained by JAMA and NEJM.  They encourage publication of teaser abstracts, like a movie trailer, but detailed results are subject to a media embargo until publication day.  Universities and research labs are keen to cooperate, in the hope that science journalists will treat the paper’s arrival as a newsworthy event.

     Embargoes may be needed in some case, but for most studies the scientific community is turning against pre-publication secrecy.  Treating publication as a news event is itself a problem, contributing to ‘study-a-day’ media coverage that exaggerates the importance of new studies relative to previous knowledge.  And limiting prior scrutiny to a handful of referees and editors raises the risk of error.  Policies favoring prior circulation of working papers were adopted long ago in PNAS, and have recently been adopted in the health sciences at BMJ and The Lancet.  In nutrition, the AJCN and Journal of Nutrition still put some limits on prior circulation, discouraging their use.

     Why would different kinds of journals have different policies?  One factor could be audience demand for different kinds of news.  Many people want to know about the latest findings in nutrition and medicine, so media outlets often assign reporters to meet that need.  Universities are happy to supply a curated flow of individual studies in the specific fields that reporters most want to write about, like dietary advice and lifestyle choices.  Managing the flow of news is also important for high-stakes pharmaceutical trials and other controversial studies.  But in many cases, secrecy before publication is sought mainly to protect the economic interests of the publisher.  With JAMA, NEJM and some others, subscriptions are still important so they must restrict prior publication to enforce a paywall.  And some journals like Science and Nature run scientific articles alongside weekly news about science, with significant revenue from ads for lab equipment and materials. These journals need publicity to attract traffic for their journal as a news source, to sell both subscriptions and advertising.