In 1999, I was still a student in solid state physics, not far past my bachelor's degree, and happened to notice the publication of something that, to this day,

In 1999, I was still a student in solid state physics, not far past my bachelor's degree, and happened to notice the publication of something that, to this day, I suspect might be (note, load bearing "might") a critical breakthrough for desalination. Nothing came of it. Nobody has published any follow-up for it. Nobody has done any research that would contradict it either. It's just sitting out there, unnoticed, decades later. Was it withheld from the public? Eh... yes? Kind of? Because it was only ever published in a journal - probably Materials Letters, but this was a long time ago - that you would only have access to if you were a graduate (or ambitious undergraduate) student with plenty of time to read in a university library, or a specialist in the very narrow field that journal was for, somebody with a membership included subscription... This isn't gatekeeping, this is, to be blunt, profit motivated hoarding by a handful of publishers in the academic journals business. And this is the thing that arXiv.org and other pre-print venues are actually having an impact on. I, for one, am strongly in favor of academic information being widely available. I'm not as much in favor of people who have not demonstrated their competencies in something that requires a great deal of both knowledge and skill feeling entitled to being given a platform for their (usually laughably clueless) proposals. If you've done enough work to have a tested hypothesis, that's different.