Grey literature

[1] The literature he referred to consisted of intelligence reports and notes on atomic research produced in vast quantities by the Allied Forces during World War II.

In a conference held by the British Lending Library Division in 1978, Auger used the term "grey literature" to describe the concept for the first time.

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".

Thus grey literature is usually inaccessible through relevant reference tools such as databases and indexes, which rely upon the reporting of subscription agents.

[5] They proposed the "Prague definition" 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.

The term grey literature acts as a collective noun to refer to a large number of publications types produced by organizations for various reasons.

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.

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.

The relative importance of grey literature is largely dependent on research disciplines and subjects, on methodological approaches, and on the sources they use.

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.

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, as the growth of major search engines has made retrieving grey literature simultaneously easier and more cluttered.

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.

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.