Access and document
supply: a comparative study of grey literature
Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C. & Schöpfel, J.
Notes on the authors:
Chérifa
Boukacem-Zeghmouri graduated with a Master’s Degree in Library Sciences from the University
of Algiers (DZ) in 1996. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Lyon 2
in 2004 with a comparative study on French academic interlibrary loans and
access to digital resources. From 2001 to 2003, she worked at the University of
Lyon 1, in the Department of Scientific and Technical Information. She is
currently lecturer at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences
of the University of Lille 3. Her main interests lie in digital libraries and
in document supply.
Contact address: Dr. Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, 64 A, Rue des
Binelles, 92310 Sèvres, France. E-Mail:
boukacemc@yahoo.fr
Joachim Schöpfel graduated from the University of
Hamburg in 1984. He worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the
University of Hamburg, in the Department of Developmental and Educational
Psychology, from 1985 to 1990, before obtaining his Ph.D. from the same
university in 1992. He is head of the e-publishing and document supply
department at INIST-CNRS; at the University of Nancy he taught Culture and
Society (1992-2001) and now teaches Documentation (since 2001). He is member of
the UK Serials Group and the president of EAGLE.
Contact address: Dr. Joachim Schöpfel, INIST-CNRS, 2 allée du Parc
de Brabois, 54519 Vandoeuvre Cedex, France. E-Mail: schopfel@inist.fr
Abstract
The report addresses
the different aspects of the accessibility and dissemination of grey literature
in the digital age where the de-materialization of documents has led to a new
paradigm that has superseded the intrinsic characteristics of printed material.
Based on the added
value of grey literature for academic institutions, the report attempts to
provide an analysis of the ongoing transformations, especially concerning the
way in which research and development in the area of grey literature have
become part of the open access movement.
In this context, we
will analyse some of the major public supply services for the dissemination of
grey literature: their typology, their strategic approach, and the special
conditions and characteristics of their service. What are their projects with
regard to grey literature and the open access movement? What is the impact of
these projects on document supply, acquisition policy and the information
system?
For the study, we
selected five public institutions: the British Library (UK), the CISTI
(Canada), INIST (France), KISTI (Korea) and the TIB Hannover (Germany). We
excluded networks and corporate profit-based suppliers.
Introduction
One characteristic of grey literature is that
it is “often difficult to (…) acquire through normal bookselling channels”
(British Library)[1] because it lies “outside
of commercial circuits of publication and dissemination” (AFNOR)[2].
For those professionals and scientists who are desirous of gaining more
information, the search for and acquisition of this kind of “underground
literature” can be a time-consuming, sometimes expensive and even frustrating
experience (see for example Hartley 2004 for conference proceedings).
Because of the importance of grey resources for
scientific research and teaching, all major public document suppliers invest in
collections and delivery services for theses, conference proceedings, reports
and unpublished working papers. Some of them offer additional help for the identification
and localising of these often poorly recorded documents.
These special collections and their
bibliographic controls induce significant costs to libraries, and “grey supply”
is often more expensive than the traditional delivery of items from “white”
publications.
Today, libraries and document supply services
are confronted with the open archive (OA) movement and have had to adapt to it.
The following paper gives an overview of the grey holdings and delivery
services of five major document suppliers – the British Library (BL), the Canadian
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), the French Institut de l’Information Scientifique et
Technique (INIST), the Korean
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (KISTI) and the German
National Library of Science and
Technology of the University of Hannover (TIB) – and describes their
reactions and projects in the OA environment. This overview is completed by an
analysis of the position of the international lobby organisation of information
services, the ICSTI.
Some remarks on OA and grey literature
.
The origins of the short history of open access
are known: free peer-reviewed journals like Harnad’s Psycholoquy or Guédon’s Surfaces
and article repositories such as Ginsparg’s ArXiv
or Harnad’s CogPrints have started to
challenge the traditional model of scientific communication since the early
90s. These and other initiatives were the scientists’ and academics’ reaction
to the pricing policy implemented by the publishers of journals and reflected
their intention to re-appropriate the channel of the communication of and to improve the
dissemination of research results with the new information and communication
technologies (see Crawford et al., 1996). The general impact on intellectual
property and the “value chain” has been well documented by Roosendaal (2004);
its effect on document delivery has already been conceptualised (see Rowse,
2003 or Brown, 2003).
We won’t add another review to the rather
abundant literature on the theory, history, structure and software of the open
access movement. The reader will find comprehensive introductions to the
European and more specifically to the French initiatives on the Southampton[3],
URFIST Paris[4], CNRS[5]
or Max-Planck[6] websites or through textbooks
such as Grüttemeier & Mahon (2002) and Aubry & Janik (2005).
Yet, the conceptualisation of the relationship
between OA and grey literature is just at the beginning stages (see for example
Sondergaard et al., 2003, Banks, 2004 or Stock and Schöpfel, 2005). Do the
“green” or “gold” roads (Guédon, 2004) transform white into grey documents
because they leave the traditional commercial control and dissemination
channels? Or, on the contrary, do open archives promote the shift from grey to
white documents by increasing their availability and access? It is obvious that
the boundary between white and grey is shifting, and that we need more
empirical evidence on grey literature and open access systems in order to
update our understanding of what is grey.
Compared to article repositories, open archives
for grey literature are more recent and less numerous. One of the first, most
important initiatives (if not the first) was the 1996 creation of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations (NDLTD) by Virginia Tech. Other totally or partly grey
realisations are the French-Canadian Cyberthèses
developed by the Montreal and Lyon 2 universities (electronic theses and
dissertations, ETDs), Grisemine from
the University Lille 1 (see Claerebout 2004), Archimer from the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the
Sea (IFREMER), the French national portal in mathematics Mathdoc (preprints, course material, proceedings and ETDs together
with white resources and archives) and the open archives of the CNRS Centre of
Direct Scientific Communication at Lyon (CCSD), such like ArchiveSIC and MemSIC
(publications, dissertations and working papers in information and
communication sciences) or TEL (ETDs, see Paillassard et al., 2005).
In spite of their great variety, all these
archives and repositories have in common the increased value awarded to grey
resources and the improvement of their availability and dissemination.
Nevertheless, the majority of them are small-scale projects compared to the
existing print holdings of grey literature. Another characteristic of these
archives: up to now, reports, proceedings and other non-traditional types of
grey literature (educational materials, working papers etc.) have been rather
under-represented, compared to dissertations and preprints (cf. Banks 2006).
But what exactly is the impact of the OA
movement on the former suppliers of theses, reports and proceedings? How are
they reacting in response to the development of institutional repositories; how
are they involved especially in the domain of grey literature? There is very
little evidence on this topic (for the North American context and the role
of the physics preprints archive, ArXiv.org, see Jackson, 2004), so we decided to undertake an
empirical study based on information available on the Web or published
elsewhere and on interviews with the leading managers of the cited
institutions.
Questions and methodology
The underlying questions are about the existing
holdings of grey resources, supply conditions and pricing, involvement in
digital and in more specific OA projects, and on approaches and attitudes
towards the OA movement. Five major institutions were selected for this study:
The British
Library (BL)[7]
The Canadian
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)[8]
The French Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST)[9]
The Korean
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (KISTI)[10]
The German National Library of Science and Technology of the University of Hannover
(TIB)[11]
These “traditional suppliers” have in common a
public mission to collect, preserve, archive and disseminate scientific
information through a non-profit ILL and a document delivery service that is
based on a mixed economic model with their income supplied both by public
funding and their customers’ fees. In a certain way, they all share the “belief
that collecting world knowledge and making it available for investigation
generates new ideas and advances society” (The British Library, 2005).
ILL and document supply
networks such as Subito, IMPALA or AutoDoc, were excluded because they have
neither their own holdings nor a specific acquisition policy. For similar
reasons, we excluded corporate, profit-based suppliers such as Infotrieve.
First we gathered information about collections
and supply conditions – services, prices, activity reports etc. – from the web
sites or from other sources. The information was organized in the following
plan:
|
Holdings |
Services |
Requests |
Prices |
BL |
|
|
|
|
CISTI |
|
|
|
|
INIST |
|
|
|
|
KISTI |
|
|
|
|
TIB |
|
|
|
|
Based on this information, we contacted the
leading supply managers of the five institutions and proposed a survey on the
following topics:
The original verbal contact taken up with the
supply managers was followed by a written version of the survey and a
semi-directive interview that potentially included other areas as well. The
synthesis and interpretation of these responses will be communicated to the
various institutions for comments and validation.
We’ll try to get additional information from
the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), a
forum that “seeks to reduce or eliminate barriers to effective transfer of
information by (…) enhancing access to and delivery of information to business,
academia, government and the public”.[12]
Our underlying assumption is that even if the
impact of increased access to digital resources on document supply is
relatively well documented, little is known about the specific effect on grey
literature, especially in the sector of open access. Our hypotheses are:
During the 7th International
Conference on Grey Literature held at Nancy, we presented the background,
methodology and some preliminary results. The definitive results will be
published in 2006.
In the following, we communicate the first (and
incomplete) findings on the holdings, services and OA projects of the five
institutions, without any results from the still ongoing survey. It is a work
in progress, mentioned to inform others about our research project without any
anticipation of future findings and conclusions.
The
British Library
The British Library is the world’s largest
supplier of scientific information (Brindley, 2005). Its grey holdings – mainly
dissertations, reports and conference proceedings – comprise about 4.9 million
items from a wide variety of sources (UK theses, NASA and NTIS reports,
proceedings from most of the international scientific events, but also maps,
manuscripts, audio and music documents, etc.)[13].
The British Library was the most important national input centre in the
European EAGLE network, providing more than 50% of the overall SIGLE records.
Nevertheless, since 1998/1999 the British
Library has to cope with a significant decrease in the number of requests. Even
if the exact number of requests is no longer published in the annual reports,
the decline can be estimated at 5-10% per year (from 4 million in 1998/1999 to
2.4 million in 2004/2005).
In spite of this, the decrease in revenue from
document supply does not affect its acquisition policy “which (is) seen as part
of the public good” (Brown, 2003). The fundamental role of information
collecting and preserving has been validated and reinforced by the report
“Redefining the Library: The British Library’s strategy 2005-2008”[14]
that places the end-user at the heart of its overall consideration. Their
central credo is to “enrich the user’s experience”; their main objective: the
creation of a digital library. In this new environment, document delivery is no
longer a “stand-alone business” or “separate entity” but “one part of an
integrated range of information services” (Brindley, 2005).
The British Library contributes to OA projects
mainly through the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), which indicates
improved relationships with the UK higher education community (Law, 2004,
Ceeney, 2004); one pilot project was the MAGiC cooperation with Cranfield
University on scientific and technical reports (Needham, 2002). Other projects
at the edge of grey and OA are the selective archiving of websites, the
archival sound recordings (ASR) project and the digitalisation of selected
collections in the context of the UK Digital Preservation Coalition (Millar,
2001). Some “Co-operation and Partnership Programmes” (Smith, 2001) are focused
on the preserving, digitalisation and disclosure of national heritage resources
and non-traditional items (legal materials, company reports, official
publications etc.).
CISTI
The CISTI has a long
history going back to 1929 (Krym and VanBuskirk, 2001). As one of the largest
collections in North America, its mission is “to support the research and
innovation communities by managing and disseminating high-value scientific,
technical and medical information products and related services”.[15]
The CISTI has become, over the years, the major provider of scientific
information in Canada, making up about 36% of the Canadian market in the year
2000.
Apart from scientific
periodicals (50,000+ titles), the CISTI collections include monographs,
conference proceedings, technical reports and dissertations. For all types of
documents the CISTI outlines a specific acquisition plan, except those
dissertations that are collected only in response to document supply requests[16].
Since 2002, the CISTI
has reported a decrease in revenue from its traditional activities, which is
linked to the development of “concurrent” alternative access to scientific
information – access to online journals (“big deals”), the availability of free
resources on the Web, and open (free) journals and archives. This decrease in
income from traditional document supply, considered to be a long-lasting
reality, is at the origin of the redefinition of its economic model, especially
of the charges for resource acquisition, and of its strategic development.
The strategic plan 2005 – 2010[17] proposes a partnership strategy
where CISTI creates, hosts and maintains an open access institutional
repository for the publication of Canadian scientists and academics.
Another open access partnership is
with the press of the CNRC that, since 1929, has published journals,
monographs, and other types of grey literature. The online version of the 15
peer-reviewed CNRC journals is available to the Canadian scientific community
for free through the CISTI web site. For other countries, the same access is
based on a subscription that contributes to the economic viability of the CNRC
press.
These projects are part of the
“depository services program” (DSP) designed “to ensure that Canadians have
ready and equal access to federal government information”, made possible by
funding from the Treasury Board of Canada (VanBuskirk and Krym, 2003).
“This integrated, partnership-based approach to
STM information will result in a Canadian science "infostructure" and
a viable national STM publishing infrastructure. The competitive advantages
offered by this investment will lead to better research and a more innovative
economy”[18].
The overall position of
the OAI seems rather prudent – based on a realistic knowledge of national
scientific production and the information requirements of their customers, the
CISTI acknowledges that the number of supply requests will continue to decrease
but that this is mainly linked to the online access of electronic periodicals
and not to institutional repositories or other open archives.
INIST
Founded in 1988, the Institute for Scientific
and Technical Information is a service unit of the French National Centre for
Scientific Research (CNRS). Its mission is to collect, analyse and disseminate
the results and findings of worldwide research in STM, social sciences and
humanities. The supply of copies of scientific and technical documents is part
of its traditional activities, whether or not the documents are held at INIST
(Schöpfel, 2003).
The legal background to this service is based
on the French law on intellectual property as well as on an agreement with the
French copyright agency (CFC).
The INIST grey collections are rather
significant: 70,000 conference proceedings, 150,000 dissertations and theses
and 70,000 scientific and technical reports. As the national centre of the
European EAGLE network, INIST is a central part in the French landscape of the
collection and dissemination of grey public research documents.
The CNRS and INIST have been particularly
active in several ways in the European and French OA movement (Romary, 2005,
Schöpfel, 2005, Grüttemeier, to be published). Some of these activities are:
The general evolution of the INIST supply
activity is well documented (see Schöpfel, 2003, Bador et al., to be
published). Since 2001, the downward trend is about 10% per year. INIST offers
print and electronic delivery (ARIEL); secured document supply with digital
rights management is under preparation.
Document supply and resource acquisition are
not directly linked. INIST’s “historical” objective is to supply all requested
documents, may they be part of its collections or not. In 2005, more than 20%
of the items supplied were from other (French and foreign) libraries, and this
percentage is steadily increasing. At the heart of the supply service is the identification
and localisation of the requested items. As a result, the INIST supply service
could become more and more independent of its own collections which would be
“replaced” by remote resources (online resources, holdings from other
libraries).
KISTI
The South Korean science
and technology information centre, a non-profit affiliated organization of the
Korean Research Council of Public Science and Technology under the control of
the Prime Minister’s Office (Choi 2003), provides a nationwide information
service to support industrial and technological development in Korea by
facilitating the access to and utilization of information resources.
The KISTI collection
contains a wide variety of resources, journals, monographs, R&D reports,
conference proceedings, patent specifications etc. The document delivery
service supplied more than 300,000 items in 2001, from the KISTI holdings or
from other libraries (11%), especially foreign document service bodies such as
the British Library (Shin and Oh, 2002).
KISTI has developed a
Scientific Information Integrated System (SIIS), a portal system that gives
access to databases and online resources.[20]
Grey literature is part of these digital information resources: access is
provided to research and development reports (200,000 items), master and
doctoral dissertations (700,000 items), Korean patents (2,100,000 items) and
foreign patents (14,000,000 items), the science and technology factual database
(1,400,000 items) and scientific materials and instruments (22,000 items)
(Choi, 2003).
The OAI is discussed in
Korea but up to now it seems unclear if it would become a national standard for
the long-term preserving of and access to digital information (Choi 2003).
Nevertheless, KISTI has been developing a multilingual electronic theses and
dissertations (ETD) system since 1989 as a national digital library in South
Korea and as part of the international effort to construct a networked digital
library of theses and dissertations (Zhang, Lee and You, 2001). This database
supports full-text searches in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese, and
provides access at individual page level. In September 2001, it contained
already 23,368 ETDs; about 25% of the visits came from more than 20 foreign
countries.
TIB Hannover
As one of the most important libraries in Germany since its
foundation in 1959, the German National Library of Science and Technology of
the University of Hannover (TIB) defines its task as the following: “to
comprehensively acquire and archive literature from around the world pertaining
to engineering and the natural sciences… Holdings (…) are available (…) through
our document delivery service”.[21]
The library “places a particular emphasis” on the acquisition of grey
literature. The TIB holdings comprise around 8.2 million items (print,
microforms, CD-ROMs), a figure that includes conference proceedings, research
reports, patents, norms and standards, and dissertations.
The TIB participates in
a large number of projects, with a key focus on electronic publications and the
development of a digital library. Some current projects are on grey literature
and/or open access:[22]
Concluding remarks
This
communication is limited to an overview of the focus of the study and of a
global description of the general mission, holdings, acquisition policy and OA
projects of the five institutions. Some preliminary results:
These
first results are based on an analysis of web-based and published information.
They will be amended and completed in the next months by the feedback on our
survey on document supply and OA projects.
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Acknowledgments
to H. Prost for providing statistical data on INIST document supply and to N.
Hull for a careful review of the English version.