Publications from Industry. Personal and Corporate Incentives

Industry scientists are often asked by their colleagues from academia why they do not publish more. The caricature, it seems, is of an active and productive industry generating lots of data that could be of benefit to the scientific community and yet keeping them all under wraps for various purposes related to profits. The patents we write, and which patent offices publish, appear not to count as shared information. When it comes to actually sharing materials, well, everyone knows just how much red tape is involved whenever they have to deal with industry people. In reality, industry scientists do publish in refereed journals, although almost certainly with less frequency than our counterparts in universities and research institutions. The reasons for this, however, are less related to companies being over-secretive about research results and have more to do with the prosaic demands of life for an average scientist working in industry. Industry scientists do wish to share the materials described in their publications but have to live by a set of rules that, although applying to industry and academia alike, tend to be enforced more diligently in industry. This article will attempt to describe, from the point of view of scientists working for a company, how the complex formula balancing individual career, institutional interests, and the natural desire to share knowledge create different constraints for an industry scientist from that of an academic. The outcome of the equation, however, the desire to share in the scientific community and advance scientific knowledge, is ultimately the same within ivory towers and behind company walls.