First of all, if it’s not reproducible, it’s not science. The entire point of science is getting results that give insight to others. Second, often the papers

First of all, if it’s not reproducible, it’s not science. The entire point of science is getting results that give insight to others. Second, often the papers set prerequisites that are not available to anyone else, because these, too, are undocumented. This is cool if you want an inspiration, but large parts of these papers are as useful as watching Star Trek for actual science. They can serve as inspiration, but they can’t tell you how to replicate something, or give you possible leads to expand on it. And this issue gets even worse – if I’m writing an undergrad thesis on a tech that Google has several years lead on, my thesis won’t be able to produce anything new. I can’t expand on the state of the art, because the state of the art isn’t even available to me.