Talking to people who worked in that era, it was a different time with different constraints. There was no internet, and publishing a paper could be a time-inte

Talking to people who worked in that era, it was a different time with different constraints. There was no internet, and publishing a paper could be a time-intensive and laborious process. Typing, mailing, typesetting, and so forth. So it was common for a lot of stuff to just be published in house as technical reports and so forth, to not involve the overhead of external publishers. If you wanted something, you'd mail or call a colleague and ask them, and they'd mail you a white paper or monograph from their stack of copies in the hallway. I started doing research long ago enough that I got a bit of exposure to that world, in the sense that that publication process was still briefly in place, and I saw those white papers passed around and used. Some of them were very influential. The problem in some ways is that as people migrated to the current system with an emphasis on published articles, that stuff that people were actually using kind of dropped out of consciousness, sort of along the lines the article is describing. I can think of unpublished white papers that were cited immensely; people made fun of them never being turned into published papers. Maybe it's hurt the the paper in the current day along the lines of the target piece, but what's sad or funny is it never occurred to people that there was a work that was being cited a lot that never got published, as in to question the value of the publication process itself. I don't disagree with you but there's a bit of broader historical context that's missing from the piece I think. The irony is that today we might be seeing a return to the white paper model, in the form of preprints and open access archival papers, but it's just massively distributed. Maybe there's some lessons to be learned from that lost previous era (Google search dropping links, etc.)? Maybe it's just inevitable that as time goes on some things will be lost regardless.