WorldWideScience.org

Bringing Light to Grey

Brian A. Hitson
Associate Director
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
U.S. Department of Energy

Introduction

Opening Remarks

What is "Grey"

• Wikipedia: "…a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers… "

• " …information that is not searchable or accessible through conventional search engines or subject directories and is not generally produced by commercial publishing organisations." (National Library of Australia)

• Webster's Dictionary: "An achromatic colour between the extremes of black and white."

Defining grey literature - examples

"Between the extremes of black and white"

• published journals

• books

• professional society conference proceedings

• preprints

• e-prints

• technical reports lectures

• numeric data sets

• audio/visual media

• blogs

• fora, etc.

• ideas

• concepts

• thought

Grey = Deep

Grey literature also used to describe "deep web".

Two Key Challenges of the "Deep"

1. What you don't know can hurt you (or, at least, it could help you).

Challenges of grey literature.

Expand on: storage/preservation issues, accessibility, and exponential growth

Two Key Challenges of the "Deep"

2. Time = money and delayed progress.

Challenges of grey literature.

Expand on: storage/preservation issues, accessibility, and exponential growth

Overcoming Challenges of the "Deep"

Federated search drills down to the deep web where scientific databases reside

Surface Web

Deep Web Databases

First Deep Web Search Engine: Science.gov

How federated searching enables better access to grey literature

Prominent Deep Web Search Engines

• Science.gov

• ScienceAccelerator.gov

• E-print Network

• Science Conference Proceedings

• Federal R&D Project Summaries

WorldWideScience.org – makes grey literature from around the world available Background/history of WWS.

WorldWideScience.org Databases/Portals

WorldWideScience.org History

• Concept introduced by OSTI Director, Walt Warnick, June 2006, Bethesda, Maryland

• Bilateral U.S.(DOE)/U.K. (British Library) partnership, January 2007, London  

WorldWideScience.org History Continued

• Demonstration of first prototype, June 2007, Nancy, France

• Multilateral governance structure, WorldWideScience Alliance, established, June 2008, Seoul

• Common ingredient: International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI)

WorldWideScience.org Facts and Figures

• Searches 49 science databases and portals sponsored by governments and national institutions in 54 countries

• Covers scientific literature from over three-fourths of the world's population

• Includes a vast quantity of science (over 375 million pages), much of which is grey literature

WorldWideScience Search Results

ETDEWEB Bibliographic Citation

OpenSIGLE, System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe

Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA-UiB)

CSIR Research Space (CSIR)

Journal of Agriculture and Envi

Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT)

What’s Next for WWS.org?

• Overcoming scalability issues

• Offering alerts service

• Searching multilingual sources

Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM)

ICSTI Technical Projects

• Numeric Data

• Multimedia

• Web 2.0

Conclusions

Grey is…

• Global

• Growing

• Good… for	science
	medicine technology