There are good commercial reasons for firms to share their research in science journals, but the practice seems to be falling out of favour.
Academic research might lay the groundwork for modern technology, but the products we use daily are often shaped by innovations from corporate labs. Unlike in academia, where publishing is central to progress, corporate research tends to prioritize secrecy — protecting discoveries to maintain a competitive edge. That is not to say that companies don’t disseminate the results of their research. Results are often shared in company annual reports, investor prospectuses and white papers. And US publicly traded firms produce around 30,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications a year, says Dror Shvadron, a researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada who studies how companies approach scientific research. “It’s a big activity that firms are involved in,” he says. Read more in Nature.