> If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret

> If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret if and until you can prove the whole bigger result by yourself. However long that might take. This is exactly what people think, and exactly what happens, especially in winner-takes-all situations. You end up with an interesting tension between how long you can wait to build your story, and how long until someone else publishes the same findings and takes all the credit. A classic example in physics involves the discovery of the J/ψ particle [0]. Samuel Ting's group at MIT discovered it first (chronologically) but Ting decided he needed time to flesh out the findings, and so sat on the discovery and kept it quiet. Meanwhile, Burton Richter's group at Stanford also happened upon the discovery, but they were less inclined to be quiet. Ting found out, and (in a spirit of collaboration) both groups submitted their papers for publication at the same time, and were published in the same issue of Physical Review Letters. They both won the Nobel 2 years later. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/psi_meson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/psi_meson