12 Facts About Grey literature

Grey literature is materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels.

Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organizations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.

Farace and J Schopfel pointed out that existing definitions of grey literature were predominantly economic, and argued that in a changing research environment, with new channels of scientific communication, grey literature needed a new conceptual framework.

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.

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

Grey literature is particularly important as a means of distributing scientific and technical and public policy and practice information.

Generally, grey literature lacks any strict or meaningful bibliographic control.

Some 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 informal nature of grey literature has meant that it has become more numerous as the technology that allows people to create documentation has improved.

Grey literature reports are thus far more easily found online than they were, often at no cost to access.

Various databases and libraries collect and make available print and digital grey literature; however, the cost and difficulty of finding and cataloguing grey literature mean that it is still difficult to find large collections.

The Grey literature Journal appears both in print and electronic formats.