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  • NATURE INDEX

What incentives do companies need to publish research?

There are good commercial reasons for firms to share their research in science journals, but the practice seems to be falling out of favour.
By
  1. Brian Owens

    1. Brian Owens is a freelance writer in New Brunswick, Canada.

Human figures work in an ideas factory. Light bulbs are turned into scientific papers the papers are folded into paper planes by the figures and posted out of the window. Other figures box up light bulbs and hide them into a huge vault with a heavy door.

Illustration: Kouzou Sakai for Nature Index

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.

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Nature 642, S2-S5 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01926-y

This article is part of Nature Index 2025 Science Inc., an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

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