Technical reports which emanate from private companies engaged in industrial research for their own purposes are usually considered proprietary and are not readily distributed outside of the company. They are generally internal reports, and may be described as idea records, correspondence, technical memoranda, project plans, patents, market analysis reports, financial documents, drawings, and plans. United States anti-trust and patent laws foster competition in our free enterprise system, thus encouraging companies to guard information about both techniques and basic scientific discoveries.
The internal publication system of many large companies gives scientists within the company the prestige and peer recognition that would otherwise be satisfied by publication in scientific journals. The technical reports produced by private companies are among the most difficult to obtain and in fact may be available only from the company, if at all. See for an example the IBM Technical Paper Archive, which provides access to technical reports written by members of the IBM Research community. Technical reports that were subsequently published elsewhere, in scientific journals, for example, are removed from the IBM technical reports database.