Lets say you're a physicist maximizing utility. It's pretty embarrassing to publish results with mistakes in them and the more important the results the more embarrassing it would be to announce results later shown to be the product of some kind of incompetence. So one can usually expect published results of serious import to have been checked over and over for errors.

But the calculus changes when we introduce the incentive of discovering something before anyone else. This is particularly the case when the discovery is likely to lead to a Nobel prize. In this case a physicist might be less diligent about checking the work in order to make sure she is the first out with the new results.

Now in this case CERN-OPERA is pretty much the only game in town. No one else can measure this many neutrinos with this kind of accuracy. So it would seem like they could take all the time they needed to check all the possible sources of error. But if Hyena is right that OPERA's data is/was shortly going to be public then they risk someone outside CERN-OPERA noticing the deviation from expected delay and publishing the results. By itself that is pretty embarrassing and it introduces some controversy regarding who deserves credit for the discovery.

Now after watching the presentation I get the sense that they really did check everything they could think of and it sounds like they took about six months to prepare analysis. It also sounds like all the relevant calibration issues are just too tricky and complex for anyone outside the CERN-OPERA to be the first to publish without risking embarrassment. Nor do I know for sure what kind of access to the results was available to outside physicists. So I think the alleged effect was at most minimal. But to update on publication requires a good model of the incentives the physicists faced.