Forbid the publication
If I understand the question, I think you want the Workflow module.  You probably also need the Revisioning module, and potentially the Module Grants and Rules modules.

I don't recall testing this particular workflow, though.  It is also worth noting that workflows can be a pain to set up, and adding workflow to an existing site can be problematic because existing nodes will not have a workflow yet (some scripts to fix this are available if you poke around).

This question is tagged for Drupal 7, which presents a problem with this solution.  Workflow and Module Grants don't have D7 versions yet.  There are discussions about ports in the issues, but nothing has been released yet.