Actually anything that's gotten as far as journal publication should be exactly reproducible; I remember having to include the packages I was using and everything else in one archive for my couple of journal publications. Conceded that folks are not quite so careful for off the cuff work; same thing as having file:/// URIs in web pages.
And I'm hesitant to complain about it too greatly; my father's PhD thesis cannot be reproduced without a specific type ball for a Selectric and I know of numerous people who have kept dragging their old text files off disk packs to magtape to 8" disks to 5 1/4" disks to 3 1/2" disks and finally to CD ROMs where they have to duplicate all the CDs every few years lest they become unreadable due to dye fade. I know several photographers who are downright paranoid about an almost literal bitrot—if you ever want to see someone spitting mad with rage, telling a photographer that his precious negative or RAW file cannot be located, or read, or even decoded (a nontrivial issue with RAWs and older image formats, and depending on language and system even with text files!) will get you there.
Saying "if you preserved the files, we will recreate your masterpiece exactly" might be an overreaction to this but it's not impossible to understand where people are coming from. Particularly the poor dears coming from Word where moving a document from 2002 to 2008 will change the typesetting subtly and sometimes not so subtly.
And I'm hesitant to complain about it too greatly; my father's PhD thesis cannot be reproduced without a specific type ball for a Selectric and I know of numerous people who have kept dragging their old text files off disk packs to magtape to 8" disks to 5 1/4" disks to 3 1/2" disks and finally to CD ROMs where they have to duplicate all the CDs every few years lest they become unreadable due to dye fade. I know several photographers who are downright paranoid about an almost literal bitrot—if you ever want to see someone spitting mad with rage, telling a photographer that his precious negative or RAW file cannot be located, or read, or even decoded (a nontrivial issue with RAWs and older image formats, and depending on language and system even with text files!) will get you there.
Saying "if you preserved the files, we will recreate your masterpiece exactly" might be an overreaction to this but it's not impossible to understand where people are coming from. Particularly the poor dears coming from Word where moving a document from 2002 to 2008 will change the typesetting subtly and sometimes not so subtly.