The problem is that survival and prestige in the academic community is directly related to publications.  Also, journals don&#x27;t accept non-novel research.  So helping someone scoop your current or future research directly hurts you.<p>Obviously that&#x27;s not a good thing, but it&#x27;s a pretty straightforward response to the circumstances of academic papers.  It has all kinds of other side-effects too: salami slicing, non-reproducible results, publication bias, etc.