🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <58252@dime.cs.umass.edu> connolly@piglet.cs.umass.edu (Christopher Ian Connolly) writes:
>
>
>I have nothing against technical reports as a means of rapidly disseminating 
>information, but as you yourself point out, they're not peer-reviewed, and I
>maintain that they're not consistently accessible enough to cite.  Besides,
>the report in question was from 1986, and if it were of high enough quality,
>wouldn't it have been published elsewhere by now (see, e.g., Kevin Dowling's
>post)?
>

Does someone lose priority on a research idea presented in a technical
report, if it turns out they are unable or unwilling to publish in a
journal or conference? This isn't an idle question by any means, I
believe the original formulation of the backpropagation learning
algorithm, in Paul Werbos's Ph.D. thesis in 1974, never appeared
anywhere but in a TR-report thesis. This turn of events caused much
controversy when the algorithm was independently developed by several
different other groups in the late 1980's.