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Behind closed doors

Confidential business information is commonly used to hide data about industry products from public view. Researchers, regulators and companies are currently struggling to redefine who needs to know what about commercial products and when they need to know it.

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Figure 1: Large swaths of regulatory documents—sometimes running into tens of pages—can be redacted by regulatory agencies if they feel the information can produce competitive harm.
Figure 2: CBI has increased over the last 20 years, whereas the number of field tests peaked in 2002 and declined.

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DeFrancesco, L. Behind closed doors. Nat Biotechnol 32, 528–535 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2923

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