Document Supply of Grey Literature and Open Access: Ten Years Later

[From the Introduction] " ... Ten years ago, in 2005, we conducted a first survey on the handling of grey literature by five major document suppliers1 , with special attention to holdings, services and projects in the emerging environment of open access (Boukacem-Zeghmouri & Schöpfel 2006).At that time (figures from 2004), the supply of conference proceedings, reports, dissertations etc. was more or lessa small part of the overall activity but the survey revealed different and divergent approaches and developments, especially regarding open access projects related to grey literature. A follow-up study with the same 'big five' STI centres conducted four years later confirmed these differences. In 2008, the five centres supplied together 2.45 million items, with nearly 250,000 grey literature (9%), a slight increase inpercentage compared to the first survey. Based on the 2008 statistics, we distinguished three situations: “(a) High-level supply, low proportion of greymaterial (British Library). (b) Medium-level supply, low proportion of grey material,especially conference proceedings (CISTI, INIST, KISTI). (c) Medium-level supply,significant proportion of grey material, especially reports (TIB)' ((Schöpfel & Prost 2009p.187). The supply of dissertations was more or less insignificant' ... Each STI centrehad started carrying out its own open access strategy. Some were engaged in national repository projects, in the field of dissertations (British Library, KISTI), scientific publications (CISTI) and research reports (TIB). Other initiatives were limited to a specific research domain (UK PubMed Central hosted by the British Library) or to service provision based on partnerships and conventions (INIST). The development of grey collections was generally linked to these open access strategies, e.g. deposit of grey items, digitization of printdocuments and metadata harvesting, often together with other libraries and document suppliers (op cit,p.188). Beside open repositories, we identified two other common features: the development of document supply as a long tail service, and the interest for primary research data (e-Science) ..."