Fourteenth International Conference on Grey Literature
Tracking Innovation through Grey Literature
29-30 November 2012
National Research Council, CNR Rome, Italy
Abstracts
Session Two – Tracking Methods for Grey Literature
What goes up must come down: Publications from developing countries in the Aquatic Commons Maria Kalentsits and Armand Gribling; Fisheries & Aquaculture Branch Library, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Italy
During 2010-2012, the Fisheries and Aquaculture Branch Library (FBL) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was involved in a project that included the selection, digitizing, web-optimization, creation of metadata, and uploading into the Aquatic Commons (AC) digital repository of grey literature published by, amongst others, issuing agencies in several African countries, and a regional project in Asia - the STREAM Initiative. Furthermore, links to these full text online versions have been added to the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) bibliographic database. The AC is a thematic digital repository covering the marine, estuarine, brackish and freshwater environments. This repository is directed by the International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC) and hosted by the UNESCO/IOC International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) project office in Belgium. The AC repository is built on Eprints software. In addition, it uses the related Interoperable Repository Statistics (IRS) software for usage statistics. The paper presents the results of the analysis of the access to the grey literature from selected issuing agencies in developing countries, whereby it focuses specifically on the Technical Documents, published by the Lake Victoria Fisheries Research Project and those published by the Support to Regional Aquatic Resources Management (STREAM), which was based in Bangkok, Thailand. Examples of digital preservation and repatriation to countries of origin, two of the main objectives for FAO’s participation in the repository, are discussed. By using the IRS software the paper seeks to evaluate FAO’s contribution to the content development of the repository and it finds a confirmation of the increasing visibility of and access to some baseline information in the field of fisheries and aquaculture published by institutions and/or projects in developing countries. Finally, the paper describes some of the utilities and limitations of the software.
Data sharing in environmental sciences: A survey of CNR researchersDaniela Luzi; Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, IRPPS-CNR, Roberta Ruggieri, Senato della Repubblica, Stefania Biagioni, Institute of Information Science and Technologies, ISTI-CNR, Elisabetta Schiano, Institute of Marine Sciences, ISMAR-CNR, Italy
Today the free availability of research data is considered an important driver of innovation and of new scientific insights. Due to the increasing amount of data collected as well as to the variety of purposes, process of acquisition and formats this is not an easy task. It implies the development of policies that incentive data curation and preservation, the recognition of the value of research data as “first-class publication”, the enforcement of clear rules for open access, copyright and ownership. It is also necessary that the scientific community agree on the development and use of common interoperability standards related to data models, format and exchange protocols. Last but not least it requires that suitable infrastructures be developed at national and international level considering discipline specificity. Projects aiming to develop infrastructures for research data as well as metadata standards that enable data sharing are carried out in many disciplinary and cross-disciplinary fields. Moreover, many surveys are exploring scientists’ practices and perceptions toward data acquisition, curation and preservation focusing in particular on perceived barriers and enablers of data sharing. The paper presents a survey based on an online questionnaire submitted to CNR researchers in the area of Environmental Sciences that represent a data intensive, collaborative and multi-disciplinary field. The survey has the aim to explore researchers’ attitude in data management, use and sharing, considering practices employed in all phases of data lifecycle as well as needs and requirements that are felt to be crucial for an effective implementation of data preservation. The questionnaire consists of two sections. The first one provides the demographic characteristics of the sample and addresses questions related to the description of the research process carried out in data acquisition and management. This part is based on a common agreed assumption that data life cycle cannot be considered independently from research lifecycle. In the second one a selection of questions already submitted in large-scale international surveys are proposed in order to measure commonality and differences in attitudes as well as in institutional policies.
Tracking the Influence of Grey Literature in Public Policy Contexts: The Necessity and Benefit of Interdisciplinary ResearchBertrum H. MacDonald, Elizabeth M. De Santo, Kevin Quigley, Suzuette S. Soomai, and Peter G. Wells; Dalhousie University, Canada
The pivotal role that scientific information (much of it grey literature) can play in the search for solutions to serious global environmental problems is receiving growing attention by a diversity of researchers recently. A.P.J.Mol, professor of environmental policy at Wageningen University, for example, stated that “it is the production, the processing, the use and the flow of, as well as the access to and the control over, information that is increasingly becoming vital in environmental governance practices.... and the motivations and sources for changing unsustainable behaviour are increasingly informational” (2010). How information functions within the interface between science and policy is only weakly understood, in part because most studies have been conducted through single disciplinary lenses. Moreover, determining the life cycles of scientific information and developing an understanding of the use and influence of this information are not trivial tasks. We believe that an appreciable increase in understanding can be achieved through an interdisciplinary perspective and a comparative approach employing a suite of research methodologies to document information pathways. In particular, we contend that interdisciplinary research, drawing on “information science and management” “marine environmental science,” “marine policy decvelopment,” “fisheries science and management,” and “public policy,” can substantially increase understanding of the processes by which scientific information is incorporated into environmental policy decisions (Figure 1). This innovative, evolving interdisciplinary perspective enables addressing the question “what role and influence does grey literature have in marine environmental policy and decision-making processes” in an informative, holistic manner not feasible otherwise. Environmental problems and related policy decisions are multidimensional, as the State of the Planet Declaration issued at the conclusion of the recent Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge Towards Solution conference (London, March 2012) emphasized. “In one lifetime,” the declaration stated, “our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural, and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that cause fundamental changes in the Earth system....But the same interconnectedness provides the potential for solution: new ideas form and spread quickly, creating the momentum for the major transformation required for a truly sustainable planet.” As this paper will show, multidimensional analysis provided by an interdisciplinary perspective is essential for understanding the role of scientific information in the science-policy interface in marine environmental decision-making.
Grey communities: An empirical study on databases and repositoriesHélène Prost; Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, INIST-CNRS and Joachim Schöpfel, Charles de Gaulle University Lille 3, France
In 2012, the GreyNet network celebrates its 20th anniversary, with nearly 300 contributors from 30 different countries. In recent years, GreyNet directed its activities towards open access through the launch of OpenGrey, and the creation of the GreyNet LinkedIn group marked its entry into social networks. However, does the network attain and aggregate all scientists, academics and information professionals interested in the field of grey literature and contributing to its knowledge? Which is the potential for development of GreyNet? Our paper will explore the grey communities outside Grey Literature Network Service. It will try to discover potential members for GreyNet. Our study is following two other papers on scientific and professional participants of GreyNet, the first based on a citation analysis of the first five conferences on grey literature (Schöpfel et al., 2005), the second describing the introduction of the new OpenGrey (formerly OpenSIGLE) service (Farace et al., 2009). The GreyNet community is defined by the authors who publish in the GreyNet newsletter, in The Grey Journal, or in the proceedings of the annual conferences on grey literature. In order to detect potential contributors outside the GreyNet community, we shall undertake a bibliographic research on grey literature as a topic of publication, e.g. we shall search for original papers, articles, reports, theses and so on on grey literature, discarding the cited publications. The search for references will focus on the following bibliographic and scientometric databases: Web of Science (Thomson), Scopus (Elsevier), Library Information Science & Technology Abstracts (EBSCO), Library and Information Science Abstracts (CSA), Pascal and Francis (INIST-CNRS). It will also include the E-LIS repository with e-prints in library and information science and, if suitable, a search in the OAIster database via the OCLC WorldCat. The objective is to get an exhaustive list of the scientific production on grey literature published between 2000 and early 2012. The obtained information should allow identifying authors, their institution and country, together with preferred journals, collections and so on where they publish. We shall present a general description of this corpus and then identify the major authors. Some of them frequently use the concept of “grey literature” while others publish on topics related to grey literature, especially on dissertations and theses (citation analysis...), without this concept. By comparison of this corpus with the GreyNet directory, our study is expected to produce a list of authors - scientists, scholars and professionals - who may be interested to join the GreyNet community, via the GL conferences, the subscription to the newsletter and/or journal, or via the social network on LinkedIn. This list should be helpful for the further development of GreyNet.
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