[1] During this conference, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) (Rome, Italy) presented guidelines for the production of scientific and technical reports documents included in the wider category of grey literature (GL) defined at the International Conferences on Grey Literature held in Luxembourg (1997) and in New York (2004) – as "information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body".
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 GL producers, librarians and information professionals who agreed to collaborate in the revision of the guidelines proposed by ISS.
The goal of the Guidelines is, in fact, to permit an independent and correct production of institutional reports in accordance with basic editorial principles.
The Guidelines include ethical principles related to the process of evaluating, improving, and making reports available and the relationships between GL producers and authors.
Authorship: The GLISC guidelines were prepared by Paola De Castro and Sandra Salinetti from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome (Italy).
Banks (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA), Stefania Biagioni (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy), June Crowe (Information International Associates Inc., IIA, Oak Ridge, USA) and Markus Weber (Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, Berne, Switzerland).
The total content of the Guidelines may be reproduced for educational, not-for-profit purposes without regard for copyright; the Committee encourages distribution of the material.
Moreover, the "Nancy style" represents international guidelines developed by a corporate author (GLISC), which worked on the draft proposed by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, and signed approval of this best practice on behalf of their respective organizations, while the ANSI/NISO Z39.18 is a national standard approved by the American National Standards Institute through a number of Voting Members.
*Technical recommendations Since the "Nancy style" represents guidelines and not a standard, all technical considerations are limited to the essential, while the ANSI/NISO Z39.18 gives indications (all absent in the "Nancy style") on: The Section 6 "Presentation and display" describes standard methods for ensuring consistency in presentation including designing visual and tabular matter, formatting, etc.
Many institutions considered the relevance of the GLISC Guidelines for the production and distribution of technical reports and for educational purposed, therefore, accepted to carry out the translation of the original English version into different languages.
The use of GLISC guidelines is also supported by the European NECOBELAC Project Necobelac financed by the European Commission within the [7 Framework program], by the US National Library of Medicine Research Reporting Guidelines and Initiatives: By Organization, by the German National Library of Science and Technology TIB - Technische Informationsbibliothek: Reports / Germany and by the French Academic Agency of Francophony [1].
The proposals for their updating will make them more effective, although a regular revision is required to keep pace with the changing ITC scenarios and information policies (see De Castro et al. 2006).
*Electronic grey literature The "Nancy style" is mostly paper oriented, because editorial consistency and ethical considerations recommended for traditional documents do apply also to digital publications.
As Stefania Biagioni (of the Italian Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione - ISTI, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) clearly commented, there is much work towards standardization and the Dublin Core Initiative (DCMI: Home) is receiving worldwide consensus as it suggests adding a very simple metadata record to any specialized one.