There are untold quantities of research papers – most of which actually contain valuable, peer-reviewed data – that bypass the traditional scholarly route of publication in a journal of record and are instead self-published. This is becoming a problem: so-called ‘grey literature’ is hard to find, hard to cite, and is often condemned to oblivion because of unreliable links and poor curation of website content. Self-publishing your research data may give you full control, and is cheap and quick, but searchability has to be the enduring feature for such work to have any impact on scholarly research.
Read more about this in Toby Green’s excellent article “The chasm between the scholarly record and grey literature” (https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/chasm-between-scholarly-record-and-grey-literature).