Published or Perished: thoughts on the publication of mediocrity

Some of these points have already been touched upon in Discoverability of published objects(2) but to summarize:
• Justification for publishing such materials: it provides a footing or foundation upon which others can build. Or avoid the mistakes that we made.
• Also better than sitting hidden on a hard drive (which will eventually die or become obsolete because the OS cannot be upgraded any more i.e. Perished) - see ‘Archiving the data’ below.
For those projects that did not come to fruition, this is the equivalent of publishing negative results (which many editors call for but few will actually do).(3–6)
We are aiming for a different audience with this kind of publication. Back when scholars would patiently wander through the stacks, you would not want to waste their time with cluttering up those stacks with such mediocre material. But things have changed: our browsing/foraging behaviors have changed.