Grey literature

Grey literature (or gray literature) are materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports (annual, research, technical, project, etc.), working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organisations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.

Grey literature may be made available to the public, or distributed privately within organizations or groups, and may lack a systematic means of distribution and collection. The standard of quality, review and production of grey literature can vary considerably. Grey literature may be difficult to discover, access and evaluate but this can be addressed through the formulation of sound search strategies.

Definitions

The concept of grey literature has gradually 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".^[1] 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 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". In the second edition of his book, published in 1989, he adopted 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 City, 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".^[3] This definition has since been used extensively and is widely accepted.

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".

Other terms used for this material, both in the past and still today, include report literature, government publications, policy documents, fugitive literature, nonconventional literature, unpublished literature, non-traditional publications, and many others. With the introduction of desktop publishing and the internet, new terms added to the list include electronic publications, online publications, online resources, open access research, and digital documents.

While the term grey literature is fairly obscure and difficult to define, it has the advantage of being an agreed collective term that researchers and information professionals can use to discuss this distinct but disparate group of resources.

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, with new channels of scientific communication, grey literature needed a new conceptual framework.^[4] They proposed a new definition ("Prague Definition"): "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."^[5]

Today, due to the overwhelming success of web publishing and access to documents, the focus of grey literature has shifted to quality, intellectual property and curation. Without the revision mentioned above, the current definition risks becoming obsolete due to its inability to differentiate grey literature from other documents.

Publication types

The term grey literature acts as a collective noun to refer to a large number of publications types produced by organizations for various reasons. These include: research and project reports, annual or activity reports, theses, conference proceedings, preprints, working papers, newsletters, technical reports, recommendations and technical standards, patents, technical notes, data and statistics, presentations, field notes, laboratory research books, academic courseware, lecture notes, evaluations, and many more. The international network GreyNet maintains an online listing of document types.^[6]

Organizations produce grey literature as a means of encapsulating, storing and sharing information for their own use, and for wider distribution. This can take the form of a record of data and information on a site or project (archaeological records, survey data, working papers); sharing information on how and why things occurred (technical reports and specifications, briefings, evaluations, project reports); describing and advocating for changes to public policy, practice or legislation (white papers, discussion papers, submissions); meeting statutory or other requirements for information sharing or management (annual reports, consultation documents); and many other reasons.

Organizations are often looking to create the required output, sharing it with relevant parties quickly and easily, without the delays and restrictions of academic journal and book publishing. Often there is little incentive or justification for organizations or individuals to publish in academic journals and books, and often no need to charge for access to organizational outputs.^[7] Indeed, some information organizations may be required to make certain information and documents public. On the other hand grey literature is not necessarily always free, with some resources, such as market reports, selling for thousands of dollars. However, this is the exception and on the whole grey literature, while costly to produce, is usually made available for free.

While production and research quality may be extremely high (with organizational reputation vested in the end product), the producing body, not being a formal publisher, generally lacks the channels for extensive distribution and bibliographic control.^[8]

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 to fall under the heading of grey literature, although they again share some of the same problems of control and access.

Impact

The relative importance of grey literature is largely dependent on research disciplines and subjects, on methodological approaches, and on the sources they use. In some fields, especially in the life sciences and medical sciences, there has been a traditional preference for only using peer-reviewed academic journals while in others, such as agriculture, aeronautics and the engineering sciences in general, grey literature resources tend to predominate.

In the last few decades, systematic literature reviews in health and medicine have established the importance of discovering and analyzing grey literature as part of the evidence-base and in order to avoid publication bias.

Grey literature is particularly important as a means of distributing scientific and technical and public policy and practice information.^[9] 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.^[10] Some results simply are not published anywhere else.

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.^[11] The notion of evidence-based policy has also seen some recognition of the importance of grey literature as part of the evidence-base however the term is not yet widely used in public policy and the social sciences more broadly.

Problems

For a number of reasons, discovery, access, evaluation and curation of grey literature pose a number of difficulties.

Generally, grey literature lacks any strict or meaningful bibliographic control. Basic information such as authors, publication dates and publishing or corporate bodies may not be easily identified. Similarly, the nonprofessional layouts and formats, low print runs and non-conventional channels of distribution make the organized collection of grey literature a challenge compared to journals and books.^[2]

Although grey literature is often discussed with reference to scientific research, it is by no means restricted to any one field: outside the hard sciences, it presents significant challenges in archaeology where site surveys and excavation reports, containing unique data, have frequently been produced and circulated in informal "grey" formats.

Some 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 online. The impact of this trend has been greatly boosted since the early 2000s by the growth of major search engines. Grey reports are thus far more easily found online than they were, often at no cost to access. 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 produce online reports or publications to an adequate bibliographic standard (often omitting a publication date, for instance). Documents are often not assigned permanent URLs or DOI numbers, or stored in electronic depositories, so that link rot can develop within citations, reference lists, databases and websites. Copyright law and the copyrighted status of many reports inhibits their downloading and electronic storage and there is a lack of large scale collecting of digital grey literature. Securing long-term access to and management of grey literature in the digital era thus remains a considerable problem.

The amount of digital grey literature now available also poses a problem for finding relevant resources and to be able to assess their credibility and quality given the number of resources now available. At the same time a great deal of grey literature remains hidden, either not made public or not made discoverable via search engines.

Databases

Various databases and libraries collect and make available print and digital grey literature however the cost and difficulty of finding and cataloguing grey literature mean that it is still difficult to find large collections. The British Library began collecting print grey literature in the post WWII period and now has an extensive collection of print resources. Australian and New Zealand Policy Online has an extensive collection of grey literature on a wide range of public policy issues, Arxiv is a collection of preprints on physics and other sciences, RePEc is a collection of economics working papers.

Many university libraries provide subject guides that give information on grey literature and suggestions for databases. ROAR and OpenDOAR are directories of Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IR) and subject repositories many of which contain some grey literature. Searching each university IR individually is impracticable. Thankfully, sites such as openaccess.xyz harvest each IR using machines; indexing metadata and full text manuscripts to provide end users with a simple and intuitive visual interface, for searching millions of grey literature resources.

Resources and advocacy

The annual International grey literature conference series has been organised since 1993 by the Europe-based organisation GreyNet^[12] 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)

Greynet also produces a journal on grey literature and has been a key advocate for the recognition and study of grey literature, particularly in library and information sciences. The Grey Journal (2005, Vol.1)...(2014, Vol.10). (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.

On 16 May 2014, the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources was ratified and published.^[13]

See also

• European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation
• OpenSIGLE
• System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe

References

Further reading

External links