Advice needed: is it possible to mint a whitepaper / research article as an NFT such that only
holders can open and read it?

Building something new. Host: /venturecapital /adventures /theitinerant

Well, I guess it's slightly more complicated than that. You could store the document on something like IPFS and then have the NFT "unlock" access. 

Lit Protocol facilitates this, for instance

Building Nansen for Web3 builders @dmnddao 

Geek out on network analysis and the political economy of knowledge.

Writing @ https://amphiboly.us/