If that was your point, it was very poorly made, since you appeared to be claiming that archival-quality document storage required much more than hashing papers

If that was your point, it was very poorly made, since you appeared to be claiming that archival-quality document storage required much more than hashing papers. Archival-quality document storage requires two things: 1, hashing papers; 2, guaranteeing that the preimages of those hashes (ie the papers) remain available despite accidental and deliberate forces toward their destruction. Non-archival-quality document storage already requires thing 2, we just want to add more nines of reliablity to those guarantees, which is a fundamentally technical endeavor that the likes of Springer/Elsevier don't particularly help with.