  One of the classic ways to measure the success of a scientific facility is
the publication return, which is defined as the number of refereed papers
produced per unit of allocated resources (for example, telescope time or
proposals). The recent studies by Sterzik et al. (2015, 2016) have shown that
30-50 % of the programmes allocated time at ESO do not produce a refereed
publication. While this may be inherent to the scientific process, this finding
prompted further investigation. For this purpose, ESO conducted a Survey of
Non-Publishing Programmes (SNPP) within the activities of the Time Allocation
Working Group, similar to the monitoring campaign that was recently implemented
at ALMA (Stoehr et al. 2016). The SNPP targeted 1278 programmes scheduled
between ESO Periods 78 and 90 (October 2006 to March 2013) that had not
published a refereed paper as of April 2016. The poll was launched on 6 May
2016, remained open for four weeks, and returned 965 valid responses. This
article summarises and discusses the results of this survey, the first of its
kind at ESO.
