International Grey Literature Community responds to IPCC line of fire
Transparency in grey literature amid an onslaught of misconceptions and unknowns
AMSTERDAM, 20100223 -- At the onset of twenty-ten, Grey Literature emerged into the public arena after more than a quarter century in the corridors of libraries and in workplaces and meeting rooms of information practitioners and professionals. Grey Literature is now a topic of news in the world media. Coverage in magazines and newspapers e.g. Nature, New Scientist, The Economist, the Guardian, etc. carrying articles on the IPCC use/misuse of grey literature is current and in-depth.
For those following these news threads, much of the publicity is less than complimentary. And, the grey literature community has not been hesitant in its response via blogs, listservs, distribution lists, etc. During the coming months leading up to the Twelfth International Conference on Grey Literature (GL12), the grey literature community will have the opportunity to bundle its efforts in order to address issues that stand at the core of grey literature and which have come under fire in the public media.
One thing is certain, now that grey literature has entered the mainstream press, it will not simply disappear. It is now up to the corporate authors and publishers of grey literature as well as those organizations processing and distributing it both in print and electronic formats to address the misconceptions and unknowns about this field of information science. The Twelfth International Conference on Grey Literature will provide a global forum for stakeholders in government, academics, business and industry to come together on issues formulated in the GL12 Call-for-Papers.
This year's proposed themes accentuate the transparency in grey literature and the almost seamless processes of research, authorship, publication, indexing, as well as, the uses and applications to which it is exposed in knowledge based communities. Many of these processes are the same faced by commercial publishing, where only the differences lie in grey tech approaches to high tech issues.
Press Release Amsterdam, 25 June 2007 TextRelease reviews Cooperative Publishing Agreement Publishing Research Quarterly (PRQ) has recently been acquired by Springer. This journal was formerly owned by Transaction Periodicals Consortium and TextRelease had a Cooperative Publishing Agreement with them. The agreement ensured that a selection of papers originating in the International Conference Series on Grey Literature would annually appear in the spring issue of that journal. Over the past four years (2004-2007), almost a quarter of the content of PRQ originated in the GL-Conference Series. With the change in ownership of PRQ, TextRelease is reviewing the Cooperative Publishing Agreement and has chosen to renegotiate with a journal publisher that would be willing to act as a sponsor to the GL-Conference Series. Dominic Farace, Director TextRelease, contends that “A new Cooperative Publishing Agreement should be with a publishing house, which maintains a visible presence in the international grey literature community.” More about TextRelease
TextRelease is an independent conference and information service based in Amsterdam. TextRelease was founded in 2003 and specializes in the field of grey literature defined 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”. TextRelease’s main activities include:
The International Conference Series on Grey Literature (1993-2007)
GreyNet, Grey Literature Network Service (1992-2007)
The Grey Journal, An International Journal on Grey Literature (2005-2007)
R&D Projects in the field of grey literature (2003-2007)