Before you start throwing disruptive rules at projects, you generally want to know that there is a critical security concern for that specific work. Most research just gets published a few months later, so foreign interests can just read it in a journal and download the dataset.
It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy researching lift day-to-day work. You have way more tools in your HUMINT arsenal with this population. Sometimes research has natsec implications even though it is not in pre-class or classified status.
A famous example of this is how the US created it's stealth technology initially.
"The foundation for a science-based approach to the development of stealth aircraft was laid by Petr Ufimtsev, a Soviet physicist. In 1962, Sovietskoye Radio publishing house issued his book Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction that described the mathematical rationale for the development of stealth vehicles.
In the USSR, these ideas did not go any further, however, the Americans were very enthusiastic about them. Ufimtsev’s physical theory of diffraction has become, they say, the cornerstone of a breakthrough in the stealth technology. In the 1970s, the work was started in the USA on the basis of this knowledge as a result of which breakthrough stealth aircraft − Lockheed F-117 fighter and Northrop B-2 strategic bomber – have been produced."
https://rostec.ru/en/media/news/visible-invisible-stealth-te...