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The paper aims to investigate the impact of the open access movement on the document supply of grey literature.

The paper is based on a comparative survey of five major scientific and technical information centres: The British Library (UK), KM (Canada), INIST-CNRS (France), KISTI (South Korea) and TIB Hannover (Germany).

The five institutions supplied less than 1.8 million supplied items in 2014, i.e. half of the activity in 2004 (−55 per cent). There were 85,000 grey documents, mainly conference proceedings and reports, i.e. 5 per cent of the overall activity, a historically low level compared to 2004 (−72 per cent). At the same time, they continue to expand their open access strategies. Just as in 2004 and 2008, these strategies are specific, and they reflect institutional and national choices rather than global approaches, with two or three common or comparable projects (PubMed Central, national repositories, attribution of DOIs to datasets, dissertations and other objects). In spite of all differences, their development reveals some common features, like budget cuts, legal barriers (copyright), focus on domestic needs and open access policies to foster dissemination and impact of research results. Document supply for corporate customers tends to become a business-to-business service, while the delivery for the public sector relies more, than before, on resource sharing and networking with academic and public libraries. Except perhaps for the TIB Hannover, the declining importance of grey literature points towards their changing role – less intermediation, less acquisition and collection development and more high-value services, more dissemination and preservation capacities designed for the scientific community needs (research excellence, open access, data management, etc.).

The paper is a follow-up study of two surveys published in 2006 and 2009.

This paper aims to examine the grey literature archiving pattern at open-access repositories with special reference to Indian open-access repositories.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) was used to collect data from different document types archived by open-access repositories across the world. Data were collected by advanced search and browse features available at the BASE on document types, the number of repositories by country wise and Indian academic and research repositories. Data were tabulated using MS Excel for further analysis.

Findings indicated that open-access repositories across the world are primarily archiving reviewed literature. Grey literature is archived more at European and North American repositories compared to rest of the world. Reports, theses, dissertations and data sets are the major grey document types archived. In India, a significant contributor to the BASE index with 146 open-access sources, reviewed literature is the largest archived document types, and grey literature is above world average due to the presence of theses and dissertations at repositories of academic institutions.

Grey literature is considered as valuable sources of information for research and development. The study enables to get insights about the amount of grey content archived at open-access repositories. These findings can further be used to investigate the reasons/technology limitations for the lesser volume of grey content in repositories. Furthermore, this study helps to better understand the grey literature archiving pattern and need for corrective measures based on the success stories of repositories of Europe and North America.

Grey literature, difficult to define, acquire and process, has recently entered into an age of enlightenment due to increasing electronic publishing opportunities and digitization efforts. Emerging technologies, including social media, that can be integrated with sound, film and collection practices in many kinds of special, academic, government, public and research libraries can point to new examples of grey literature that show great demand for its utility and thus importance placed by growing user communities. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Research was reviewed using examples from the social and applied sciences literature emphasizing management constructs to demonstrate directions that grey literature had assumed in generating new forms of information.

As libraries examine the merits of grey literature, they are attempting to be hybrid centers of print and digital content to handle data, visual resources, imagery, and all forms of media. Every source can be considered a potential reference tool, access barriers to materials are lowered, and items circulate more and are requested through electronic and mobile access. This revised lifecycle of information forces libraries to rethink the scope and value of collections.

The challenges facing libraries that want to bridge formats and truly embrace new technologies are complex, potentially expensive and difficult to navigate and administer. However, the experiences of those that have welcomed grey literature can demonstrate the great potential of making less used documents more visible through emerging technologies.

Examples of scientific, business/census data, news/media coverage, genealogical information and public/consumer health content, each of which has seen large increases in demand and debuted new information products, often as open source, suggest that libraries can respond to these challenges by creating hospitable access in innovative ways by acknowledging that the lessons learned through the last few decades with new forms of grey literature can be useful in the context of library planning. The authors demonstrate how these examples now form a central core of what once was grey literature and are transitioning from low use to greater value by user communities.

IFLA's Universal Availability of Publications programme is concerned with highlighting and solving problems concerned with the widest possible availability of recorded knowledge. Its concern includes the improvement of access to grey literature (material not available through normal bookselling channels) at both national and international levels. At the national level centralization linking bibliographic control and availability is advocated. A centralized approach has already been adopted in the UK where the British Library Lending Division has developed a fairly comprehensive collection of report literature, translations, theses, conference proceedings and back up documents to synopsis journals etc. Through its monthly publication, British Reports Translations and Theses, it is also involved with the bibliographic control of grey literature.

The fire sector within the United Kingdom has identified a need to further develop their systematic use of academic literature and develop mechanisms to include academic knowledge to inform evidence-based policy and practice. By increasing knowledge exchange between the fire sector and academia, the ability to horizon scan and identify future relevant phenomena of interest to the fire sector will be achieved. Consequently, the evidence base and horizon scanning will increase the specificity of techniques, approaches and practices needed to continually improve the safety of the activities completed within the firefighting occupation, and it will also provide priority areas for investment and increase firefighter safety.

This technical paper primarily features an initial scoping review of academic and grey literature and an operational incident data review. This was completed to provide an initial and updated review of disciplines and areas of academia that are actively engaged in research relevant to the fire and rescue service. Consequently, this method sought to identify and examine the various disciplines of academia involved in fire research. This paper then uses that outcome to suggest a model of multidisciplinarity to inform the fire sector.

As a result of the scoping review, each academic discipline was identified and an initial review developed a predetermined set of key search terms. This was established through identifying the most frequently used fire-related terms within each discipline. This allowed for a comprehensive understanding of the breadth of activity and depth of complexity of fire related research within each discipline and an indicative set of key search terms to be developed. Recommendations are formulated to suggest next steps to routinely incorporate the academic knowledge base in the learning process of the fire and rescue services in the United Kingdom.

This paper provides an initial scoping map of academic literature and disciplines relevant to activities completed in the UK fire sector, which can be used to further develop the evidence base to inform the fire and rescue service of the United Kingdom. It also outlines possible mechanisms and a model to systematically facilitate knowledge exchange between academia and the fire sector by which knowledge exchange could further support the development of evidence-based policy and practice. The broad range of benefits of collaboration between the fire and rescue service and academia are explored.

This paper provides clear evidence as to why fire related research should have an increased priority status to inform the national fire and rescue services learning process and evidence for national policy and guidance development within the UK fire and rescue service. Additionally, recommendations are made to support the consideration of academic evidence in the systematic sector wide learning process.

Previously, the UK fire and rescue service had limited coordinated strategic engagement with academic disciplines to further develop their learning processes in order to produce an evidence base, which is cognisant of academic research to inform practice and guidance. This paper begins the narrowing of that gap by categorising academic literature relevant to fire research into clear disciplines, mapping these to an updated breadth of current activities undertaken by the fire and rescue service across the United Kingdom. The process also details a pilot of the proposed model to support knowledge exchange by producing an academically evidence-based submission to the National Fire Chiefs Council organisational learning process.

Grey literature in its various aspects presents many problems for producers, intermediaries and end‐users. SIGLE‐System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe – was established with the aim of providing access to, and incidentally improving bibliographic coverage of, grey literature produced in Europe. The background to and workings of the system are described. Its strengths and weaknesses are analysed to allow consideration of how far it can be presented as a model for similar ventures.

To report on the Sixth International Conference on Grey Literature held in New York, December 2004.

The report is prepared by a library professional who adds her own impartial comments.

This conference suggests the changing priorities in grey literature and how much more mainstream it has become with alternative publishing products and a wider awareness of scholarly communication principles and issues.

This is a useful summary of a conference of interest to library and information management professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to spotlight the research output in the field of grey literature (GL) during the 13-year period between 2007 and 2019 as reflected in the Scopus database.

This study has used Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, to collect data for the specified 13-year period. The sources, which had “grey literature” in their titles, were considered for the study and the period was from 2007 to 2019. The downloaded results were analysed using specific parameters. The SPSS and Excel have been used for analysing the retrieved data. The VOSviewer has been used for visualizing the network.

Scopus indexes different kinds of documents such as articles, books, chapters, conference papers, editorial, erratum, letters, notes, reviews and short surveys. There were 345 publications, which received 309 citations. GL-Conference Series: Conference Proceedings published the most number of articles. The majority 51.9 per cent of the articles were published in collaboration with authors from European countries. The term “grey literature” occurred most commonly as author keyword and index term.

The present study highlights how the area of GL has evolved during the 13-year period. The findings of the study pave the way for more detailed exploration of GL, which has relevance for the researchers.

The importance of grey literature is becoming increasingly recognised. For many organisations it encapsulates the knowledge and know‐how and thus is a vital business asset. It has similar importance in quality of life aspects – healthcare, environment and culture. Grey literature in a R&D (research and development) environment represents the cutting edge of this knowledge and so its management is of utmost importance. Partly based on involvement in defining the datamodels for R&D information interchange across Europe, the author defines a content metadata datamodel for grey literature which is more expressive and has more flexibility than any previous proposal and which integrates seamlessly with the CERIF2000 definition which will soon replace the CERIF1991 European Union Recommendation to Member States on Exchange of R&D Information. The content metadata datamodel offers significant advantages over Dublin Core yet can generate Dublin Core if required.