Personally I think is a great tool for grad students and people that want to research in the open. Just like any other science journal or information you want to keep online.
A similar example from Nikola Tesla, is our own, Satoshi Nakamoto. Right now, most of his posts are published on the Bitcointalk forum but, being a Mysql database, and a PHP app, it could go down at any point and have all the previous information erased permanently from the internet.
However if we had all that data ported to Hive, his messages could be stored forever on the Blockchain. I know that @theycallmedan also working on a data dump of information in hive to preserve these kind of information forever. I also like projects such as Propolis Wiki a Wikipedia type wiki with a Hive backend to do what Wikipedia did.