7th International Conference on Grey Literature
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050610653913 |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| Pages | 13-16 |
| Author | Julia Gelfand |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
7th International Conference on
Grey Literature
Julia Gelfand
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 1 2006, pp. 13-16, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050610653913 13
This conference which reinvigorated
itself three years ago meets
alternatively between Europe and North
America and the 2005 conference took
place at the Institut de l'Information
Scientifique et Technique (INIST)
campus of the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in
Nancy, France in the heart of Alsace-
Lorraine on December 5-6. The theme,
``Open access to grey resources''
promoted access in every possible
configuration and parlayed into open
source literature and resources, with
many examples of how implementation
can be achieved in the policies and
activities of organizations in both the
public and private sectors. The range of
papers was extensive and contained
examples of information systems and
networks, partnering and OAI, role of
repositories, document supply and
delivery, curriculum and instructional
developments, and relationships with
many publishing entities.
By holding this conference at INIST,
where an already rich tradition of grey
literature exists with the participation of
SIGLE and other databases, with the
best known PASCAL, a major
statement in the European Community
suggests how alive and well, but still
changing grey literature is. A range of
sponsors participated in this
conference, which is also an indication
of interest in the changing landscape of
grey literature and they included,
CORDIS (http://cordis.europa.eu-int/),
the European Union Bookshop in
Luxembourg, EBSCO one of the
world's largest serials vendors and
suppliers and database producers
(www.ebsco.com) and the New York
Academy of Medicine (www.nyam.
org) in addition to INIST (www.inist.fr/
index.php). Participants came from
Europe, the Mid-East, North America,
Japan, South Korea, and India.
After a very warm and generous
welcome by the host, Joachim
Schopfel, library director at INIST, the
opening inaugural address was
delivered by Dr Laurent Romary,
director of Scientific Information who
shared how the French Government is
dealing with researcher output and his
goals for coordination as he assumes a
new position as directorate of this
coordination process. He spoke of the
different roles involved in the creation,
maintenance, identification, citation,
and standardization of information; the
database production so that it can be
recalled, searched and archived;
publication archiving and the
responsibilities to self-archive and what
this means for open archiving; journal
publication initiatives with different
digitization efforts and goals to achieve
open access and what implications this
has for France moving to a centralized
model of a national repository.
Coordination is central in all these
efforts ± however, this is institutional
sharing and cooperation and that
between countries. The legal and
copyright compliance is important to
understand and follow. The objectives
as he defines it is to create a collection
of all scholarly output and
corresponding documents that
contribute to the final products into a
single repository and make this content
completely searchable in a fulltext
format. The goal is to outlive
commercial publishing with a
commitment to centralized and
integrated metadata.
Romary proposes a system platform,
HAL (http://ccsd.cnr.fr), which is a
researcher-centered system coupled to
ArXiv and needs librarians to check
corresponding metadata which runs the
gamut from simple to very complex.
Services that can be rendered from this
system serve both publishers and
readers and the host institutions so that
they can be freed from the
responsibilities of having to do this if a
national initiative is successful.
Collaboration is naturally needed with
partner institutions and relationships
with other well established databases
which have corner niches in the
information marketplace such as the
Institute for Scientific Information
(ISI), Google Scholar, etc. will
obviously improve visability and
usability of the system.
Romary is not naõÈve about the
difficulties and barriers to achieve this
plan. However, he is an industrious
architect, well respected scientist in his
own right, and has an awareness about
how difficult it is to merge formats, deal
with the scope and range of proposed
content, but thinks that if we open
things up to improved coherence we are
on the track to achieve some success in
this way. One left this session feeling
rather optimistic and wondering
whether the French will really be able to
report on progress in national
repositories in coming years.
The Italians followed this opening
presentation with a focused paper on
``Open archives and SIGLE
participation in Italy.'' SIGLE is a very
important database for grey literature or
system for information on grey
literature in Europe and was well on its
way as a database by 1984. Today, there
are more than 833,000 documents in
SIGLE.
Daniela Luzi and her colleagues at
the Istituto di Ricerche sulla
Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali,
IRPPS-CNR, Italy have been exploring
what the Italian position of the open
access initiative (OAI) is. Coordination
with French counterparts and
examining where Italian contributions
to SIGLE come from and what kind of
GL is produced suggests what
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