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Grey literature is generally defined as academic literature that is not formally published. It is an expanding field in library and information science that deals with the supply and demand side of publications not controlled by commercial publishing.
Research in this field of information has been systematically documented and archived via the International Conference Series on Grey Literature (1993, Vol.1)...(2014, Vol.16) and The Grey Journal (2005, Vol.1)...(2014, Vol.10) a flagship journal for the grey literature community. In May 2014, the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources was drafted and is online accessible via http://greyguide.isti.cnr.it/.
Early on, grey literature was simply considered informally published written material (such as reports) that may be difficult to trace via conventional channels such as published journals and monographs because it is not published commercially or is not widely accessible. It may nonetheless be an important source of information for researchers, because it tends to be original and recent.[1] Examples of grey literature include patents, technical reports from government agencies or scientific research groups, working papers from research groups or committees, white papers, and preprints.
For a number of reasons, the identification and acquisition of grey literature poses difficulties for journals and books.[2] In 1995, D.B. Simpson observed that "peripheral materials, including grey literature, expand unabated. Libraries having difficulty collecting traditional materials have little hope of acquiring the periphery".[3]
Although grey literature is often discussed with reference to scientific research, it is by no means restricted to a single field: outside the hard sciences, it presents significant problems in, for example, archaeology, in which site surveys and excavation reports, containing unique data, have frequently been produced and circulated in informal "grey" formats.
Many of the problems of accessing grey literature have decreased since the late 1990s as government, professional, business and university bodies have increasingly published their reports and other official or review documents free on the World Wide Web. The impact of this trend has been greatly boosted since the early 2000s by the growth of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Grey reports are thus far more easily found online than they were, and at radically lower cost, at least in the immediate aftermath of their publication. Most users of reports and other grey documents have migrated to using online copies, and efforts by libraries to collect hard-copy versions have generally declined in consequence. However, many problems remain because originators often fail to document online reports or publications adequately (often omitting a publication date, for instance); because documents are often not assigned permanent URLs or DOI numbers, or stored in electronic depositories, so that broken links can develop; and because the copyright status of many reports is left unclear, inhibiting their downloading and electronic storage. Securing long-run or secure access to grey literature in a predominantly digital age thus remains a considerable problem, as does archiving or overviewing such materials.
Information and research professionals generally draw a distinction between ephemera and grey literature. However, there are certain overlaps between the two media and they undoubtedly share common frustrations such as bibliographic control issues. Unique written documents such as manuscripts and archives, and personal communications, are not usually considered as falling under the heading of grey literature, although they again share some of the same problems of control and access.
The concept of grey literature has emerged since the 1970s. When Charles P. Auger published the first edition of his landmark work on "reports literature" in 1975, he did not use the term "grey literature".[4] Nevertheless, his account of this "vast body of documents", with its "continuing increasing quantity", the "difficulty it presents to the librarian", its ambiguity between temporary character and durability, and its growing impact on scientific research, was entirely compatible with what is now called grey literature. While acknowledging the challenges of reports literature, he also recognized that it held a "number of advantages over other means of dissemination, including greater speed, greater flexibility and the opportunity to go into considerable detail if necessary". For Auger, reports were a "half-published" communication medium with a "complex interrelationship [to] scientific journals". Only in the second edition of his book, published in 1989, did he adopt the term "grey literature".[2]
The so-called "Luxembourg definition", discussed and approved at the Third International Conference on Grey Literature in 1997, defined grey literature as "that which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers". In 2004, at the Sixth Conference in New York, a postscript was added for purposes of clarification: grey literature is "...not controlled by commercial publishers, i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body".[5] This definition has since been widely accepted, by, among others, the Grey Literature Network Service. It emphasizes the supply side of grey literature, namely its production and publication both in print and electronic formats. It calls attention to the question of dissemination, and the difficulty of identifying and accessing documents described as ephemeral, non-conventional or underground.
The U.S. Interagency Gray Literature Working Group (IGLWG), in its "Gray Information Functional Plan" of 1995, defined grey literature as "foreign or domestic open source material that usually is available through specialized channels and may not enter normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents". This definition accords with Mackenzie Owen’s 1997 observation that "grey does not imply any qualification [but] is merely a characterization of the distribution mode".[6]
In 2010 D.J. Farace and J. Schöpfel pointed out that existing definitions of grey literature were predominantly economic, and argued that in a changing research environment, and with new channels of scientific communication, grey literature needed a new conceptual framework.[7]
The 12th International Conference on Grey Literature at Prague in December 2010 discussed a new approach to grey literature. It concluded that the existing definition of grey literature—the New York definition—remained helpful and should not be replaced, but that it needed to be adapted to the changing environment. The definition was insufficient in the context of Internet publishing, and that further attributes were needed to differentiate grey from other items.
The proposal was to add four attributes to the New York definition:
The proposal for a new definition ("Prague Definition") of grey literature is as follows:
"Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body."
Today, due to the overwhelming success of web publishing and access to documents focus has shifted to quality, intellectual property, and intermediation. Without the revision mentioned above, the current definition risks becoming obsolete due to its inability to differentiate grey literature from other documents.
The proposal for a revised “Prague definition” brings together the former economic approach with new attributes. The next step should be to check this definition against common usage in libraries and different types of grey and other documents. Once done, the value of the definition can be evaluated on the basis of the answers to the following two questions: does this new definition include all kind of documents usually considered by LIS professionals as grey literature, including today’s difficult-to-process and hard-to-collect items, and does it lead to further differentiation or better understanding of how grey literature may be distinguished from other forms of literature? Three challenges in particular are said to face professionals in the field at the present moment:
The term grey literature traditionally referred to reports, conference proceedings and doctoral theses. In the OpenSIGLE repository, reports are the most numerous among the different types of grey literature. The "reports" category covers a wide variety of very different documents: institutional reports, annual or activity reports, project or study reports, technical reports, reports published by ministries, laboratories or research teams, etc. Some are disseminated by national and international public bodies; others are confidential, protected, or disseminated to a restricted readership, such as technical reports from industrial R&D laboratories. Some are voluminous, with statistical appendices, while others are only a few pages in length.
In the other categories, citation analyses[10] offer a wide range of grey resources. Besides theses and conference proceedings, they also include unpublished manuscripts, newsletters, recommendations and technical standards, patents, technical notes, product catalogs, data and statistics, presentations, malin-grey literature, personal communications, working papers, house journals, laboratory research books, preprints, academic courseware, lecture notes, and so on. The international network GreyNet maintains an online listing of document types.[11]
Grey literature has a role of its own as a means of distributing scientific and technical information.[12] Professionals insist on its importance for two main reasons: research results are often more detailed in reports, doctoral theses and conference proceedings than in journals, and they are distributed in these forms up to 12 or even 18 months before being published elsewhere.[13] Some results simply are not published anywhere else.
A Franco-Dutch study reviews 64 citation analyses published between 1987 and 2005, citing altogether several thousand references.[10][14] The table below shows the proportion of grey literature cited in publications from different scientific disciplines.
The relative importance of grey literature is largely dependent on research disciplines and subjects, on methodological approaches, and on sources used. In some fields, especially the life sciences and medical sciences, there has been a traditional preference for conventional distribution media (journals), while in others, such as agriculture, aeronautics and the engineering sciences in general, grey literature resources tend to predominate.
In particular, public administrations and public and industrial research laboratories produce a great deal of “grey” material, often for internal and in some cases “restricted” dissemination.[15]
According to another study, grey literature seems also to play a considerable part in the library and information sciences, accounting on average around 20% of all sources used a figure that may be compared with the citation habits in economics and educational sciences. Even so, citations to grey material vary widely between different papers from 0% to 50% and more, depending on subject areas and methodologies.[16]
The Grey Literature International Steering Committee (GLISC) was established in 2006 after the 7th International Conference on Grey Literature (GL7) held in Nancy (France) on 5–6 December 2005.
During this conference, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) (Rome, Italy) presented guidelines for the production of scientific and technical reports included in the wider category of grey literature. The Italian initiative for the adoption of uniform requirements for the production of reports was discussed during a Round Table on Quality Assessment by a small group of grey literature producers, librarians and information professionals who agreed to collaborate in the revision of the guidelines proposed by ISS. The group approving these guidelines—informally known as the "Nancy Group"—has been formally defined as the Grey Literature International Steering Committee.
The Guidelines include ethical principles related to the process of evaluating, improving, and making reports available and the relationships between grey literature producers and authors. The latter sections address the more technical aspects of preparing and submitting reports. GLISC believes the entire document is relevant to the concerns of both authors and grey literature producers.
Since 1993, GreyNet International, the [17]
GreyNet International organizes a summer workshop series on grey literature:
GreyNet International also organizes a the GreyForum Series:
GreyNet likewise publishes an academic journal on grey literature, The Grey Journal (print: ISSN 1574-1796, online: ISSN 1574-180X). The Grey Journal appears three times a year—in spring, summer, and autumn. Each issue in a volume is thematic and deals with one or more related topics in the field of grey literature. The Grey Journal appears both in print and electronic formats. The electronic version on article level is available via EBSCO's LISTA-FT Database (EBSCO Publishing). The Grey Journal is indexed by Scopus and others.
National Institutes of Health, Anonymity, Anonymous peer review, Academia, Nature (journal)
Copyright, Law, Patent, Trademark, Human rights
Peer review, Law, Academic journal, Humanities, Computer science
Paper, Literature, Middle Ages, Music, Poetry
Apple Inc., Html5, E-book, Metadata, Adobe Systems
Global warming, Peer review, Climate change, Himalayas, Ontario
Architecture, Berlin, Portugal, Germany, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Peer review, Academic publishing, Book, Rhetoric, Citation index
Typography, Propaganda, Music, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Art Nouveau
Digital repository, Open access, OceanDocs, International Association of the Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC), Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries...