Grey Literature in Scholarly Communication

Current Thinking from Libraries and Publishers

James Neal and Kate Wittenberg

A Library perspective

James Neal

What is Scholarly Communication?

• Creation of Knowledge and evaluation of its Validity

• Preservation of Information

• Transmission of Information to Others

-Technologies

-Economics

-Institutions

What is Grey Literature?

“…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” (1997)

Key Characteristics: issuing organization

document types

value/costs

nature of presentation

level of peer review

What are Key Developments?

• Author Revolution

• ATM Revolution

• New Majority Student Revolution

• Digital Preservation Revolution

• Open Revolution

• Google Revolution

What is the Urge to Publish?

• Communication

• Academic Culture

• Preservation of Ideas

• Prestige and Recognition

• Profit

What are Key Characteristics of Electronic Scholarly

Communication? (per Cronin)

• New Economics

• Vertical Integration

• New Modes of Discourse

• Democratization

• Discipline Diversity

• Importance of Trust

Key Characteristics(continued)

• Importance of Credibility

• Velocity of Communication

• Expanded Readership

• Pluralism

• Plasticity

• Adaptivity

What are Quality Assessment Systems?

• Peer Review

• Peer Review Lite

• Citation Measurement

• Open/Community Peer Review

• Career Review

• Industry Review

What is the Repository Movement?

• Discipline Repositories

• Institutional Repositories

• Consortium Repositories

• Departmental/School Repositories

• Individual Repositories

• Referatories/Virtual Repositories

What are Core Library Roles?

• Information Acquisition

• Information Synthesis

• Information Navigation

• Information Dissemination

• Information Interpretation

• Information Understanding

• Information Archiving

A Publisher Perspective

Kate Wittenberg

E-Publishing and Grey Literature

• Scholars’ thinking at its earliest stage• Timely, often requires frequent updating• Requires different form of peer review• Benefits from addition of discipline-

appropriate tools and functionality• With these tools, can be useful in teaching

as well as research• Often not easily available to scholars,

students, or libraries

Case Study: Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)

• Collaboration involving university press and libraries

• Aggregates grey literature (working papers, policy briefs, country data) in a sub-discipline

• Imbeds grey lit within an infrastructure that adds value to the scholarly content (mapping and atlas function, teaching case studies and course packs)

Grey Lit Suggests New Priorities

• Re-think the categories of traditional print publications (books, journals, grey literature, curriculum materials)

• Develop content in response to scholars’ research, teaching, and publishing needs

• Publishers as research centers that create new models and actually lead innovation in a field

• Authors as collaborators in the creating new kinds of publications within their discipline

Elements Needed for New E-Publishing Models to Emerge

• Interest and initiative from faculty, librarians/publishers

• Some form of peer review• Copyright/permissions management• Web development/design• Access management/security/preservation• Outreach/marketing/dissemination• Sustainability plan (staffing, infrastructure)