I don't really understand the requirement for public-traded companies to make the results of such preliminary tests "public" before publishing them in peer-reviewed journals.
Doesn't that sound a bit backward ? As in, the company is incentivized to disclose very optimistic preliminary results, so that it appears in the BBC newssite, and make it's share price go up ; and then, much later, to submit an article in much more obscure academic journal where all the buzz will be toned down, hopping that Joe-The-Trader does not notice ?
(Honestly curious, I'm not familiar with the legislation here.)
If you submit something for peer review, by definition it has to go to a wider audience, it has to go to people who may share it with others, it has to leave the companies control etc. You generally don't even get to know who it goes to, let alone force NDAs on them. At that point you cannot hope to keep it private. So what you're doing is releasing price-sensitive information, but only to a select few (reviewers, their teams, journal admin staff, printers etc). That's unfair as they may well trade on the information defrauding others.
So you have to release it to everyone to be fair.
But you put a disclaimer on it to say its "not peer reviewed, preliminary etc".
Then if an expert wants to trade on it, they can and they're not left out just for not being part of the peer review circuit. And if an idiot doesn't read the disclaimer, that's his problem.
I agree that we get 1000s of dumb articles from hacks based on a non-peer-reviewed, "we're only releasing this statement because we're required to" data. But the issue there is journalists being lazy, editors refusing to do their jobs and readers rewarding them IMHO, not too much transparency. At least that's what I thought before people started drinking pool cleaner...
The issue is the people (and the computer systems) it passes through for peer review.
There's a small number of publishers who put out most journals and not that many peer reviewing scientists per subfield. If you didn't publish preliminary results like this, those systems would be high value bottlenecks through which market sensitive data would flow all the time and a lot of effort would be put into breaking into them.
(edit: I do think it would be better to put out a preprint on Medrxiv at the same time though)
Doesn't that sound a bit backward ? As in, the company is incentivized to disclose very optimistic preliminary results, so that it appears in the BBC newssite, and make it's share price go up ; and then, much later, to submit an article in much more obscure academic journal where all the buzz will be toned down, hopping that Joe-The-Trader does not notice ?
(Honestly curious, I'm not familiar with the legislation here.)