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Purpose: The study aims to showcase the developmental perspective of "grey literature" and its importance to different sectors of the society. Furthermore, issues, challenges and possibilities concerned with the existence of "grey literature" have also been discoursed. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on the existing literature published in the field of "grey literature" which was identified with the aid of three leading indexing and abstracting services, Web of Science, SciVerse Scopus, and Google Scholar. Keywords like grey literature, black literature, The Grey Journal, The International Journal on Grey Literature, International Conference on Grey Literature, non-conventional literature, semi-published literature, System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe (SIGLE), European Association for the Exploitation of Grey Literature (EAGLE), white literature, white papers, theses and dissertations, GreyNet, grey literature-electronic media, Grey market, open access, OpenNet, open access repositories, institutional repositories, open archives, electronic theses and dissertations, institutional libraries, scholarly communication, access to knowledge, metadata standards for grey literature, metadata heterogeneity, disciplinary grey literature, etc. were searched in the select databases. Simple as well as advanced search feature of the databases were made use of. Moreover, for more recent and updated information on the topic, the "citing articles" feature of the databases was also used. The "citing articles" were consulted on the basis of their relevance with the subject content. Findings: The study helps to understand the definitive framework and developmental perspective of "grey literature". "Grey Literature" has emerged as a promising content for enhancing the visibility of the ideas that were earlier unexplored and least made use of "Grey literature" has also overcome the problems and issues with its existence and adoption. Technology has played a catalytic role in eradicating the issues and problems pertinent to the "grey literature" to a greater extent. Research limitations/implications: The study is based on the published literature that is indexed by only three databases, i.e. Web of Science, SciVerse Scopus and Google Scholar. Furthermore, some limited aspects of "grey literature" have been covered. Practical implications: The study will be of great help to various stakeholders and policymakers to showcase the value and importance of "grey literature" for better access and exploitation. It will also be of importance to those interested to know how the literature tagged as grey changed with the passing time and how it through its unseen characteristics has evolved as an important source of information at par with the "white literature". Originality/value: The study tries to provide a demarcated and segregated outlook of the "grey literature". It also focuses on various issues, problems and possibilities pertinent to the adoption and existence of "grey literature". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graduate theses and dissertations are one of the most important research outputs of universities. Yet, it is often difficult to find and provide access to them. Although it is now possible to get access to full-texts of theses and dissertations through the Internet, access problems still persist. In this paper, we investigate the issues of open access to graduate theses and dissertations in Turkey. We first reviewed the collection of the Higher Education Council Theses Center to find out what percentage of theses is accessible full-text. We then, through a questionnaire survey, collected the views of the authors of theses who opted to restrict access to their theses temporarily. Access to about one third of theses is restricted. As it was difficult to reach the authors of older theses and get their consent to make their theses available online, most of the restricted theses belong to pre-2006 period. An overwhelming majority (94%) of the authors restricted access to their theses because they wanted to publish papers based on their theses while two thirds (63%) did so because they feared of their theses being plagiarized. Yet, 81% of them said they support open access to theses and dissertations in general. Findings suggest that the issue of open access to theses needs to be dealt with from a broader perspective. We discuss the various access issues on the basis of our findings and offer some suggestions to solve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is scant research-based evidence on the development and adoption of open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IRs) in Africa, and in Kenya in particular. This article reports on a study that attempted to fill that gap and provide feedback on the various OA projects and advocacy work currently underway in universities and research institutions in Kenya and in other developing countries. The article presents the findings of a descriptive study that set out to evaluate the current state of IRs in Kenya. Webometric approaches and interviews with IR managers were used to collect the data for the study. The findings showed that Kenya has made some progress in adopting OA with a total of 12 IRs currently listed in the Directory of Open access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and five mandatory self-archiving policies listed in the Registry of Open access Repositories Mandatory archiving Policies (ROARMAP). Most of the IRs are owned by universities where theses and dissertations constitute the majority of the content type followed by journal articles. The results on the usage and impact of materials deposited in Kenyan IRs indicated that the most viewed publications in the repositories also received citations in Google Scholar, thereby signifying their impact and importance. The results also showed that there was a considerable interest in swahili language publications among users of the repositories in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2008, the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research has been pursuing an extensive strategy intending to give the country a solid digital infrastructure for the provision of scientific and technical information to French researchers. BSN, the 'Scientific Digital Library', has become the meeting point of all higher education and research institutions where this strategy is debated and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the DINI certificate, standard recommendations for the certification of document and publishing services, i.e. open archives, institutional repositories and platforms for open access journals, developed by the German Initiative for Networked Information DINI. The article describes the context, purpose and history of this certificate before exposing its structure and content. The eight areas include criteria for the visibility of the site, information security and long-term preservation. The article discusses the object of certification, its impact and the need to adapt some recommendations to the French-speaking context. The French translation of the certificate has been published in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some concepts and technology trends such as digital identity, large sets of data (big data) open data and data visualization that can be applied to document repositories are briefly described. In this article it is presented SocialNet repository model as an example of innovative project designed in line with such trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional repositories have become an important vector for scientific communication. Today, four out of five open archives are institutional archives. One of their characteristics is their great diversity. There is no one single model, but a variety; not a single procedure but multiple options. Our article describes four basic patterns or "archetypes" (publishing platform, container, heritage site, deposit), their success factors and some prospects. The legitimacy of institutions, but also their strategic choices and their digital infrastructure impact the future of these sites. If they neglect the needs of the scientific communities, their fate will be that of catalogs and other databases: useful indeed, but not essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper seeks to focus on the problems of integrating information from open, distributed scholarly collections, and on the opportunities these collections represent for research communities in developing countries. The paper aims to introduce OntOAIr, a semi-automatic method for constructing lightweight ontologies of documents in repositories such as those provided by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Design/methodology/approach – OntOAIr uses simplified document representations, a clustering algorithm, and ontological engineering techniques. Findings – The paper presents experimental results of the potential positive impact of ontologies and specifically of OntOAIr on the use of collections provided by OAI. Research limitations/implications – By applying OntOAIr, scholars who frequently spend many hours organizing OAI information spaces will obtain support that will allow them to speed up the entire research cycle and, expectedly, participate more fully in global research communities. Originality/value – The proposed method allows human and software agents to organize and retrieve groups of documents from multiple collections. Applications of OntOAIr include enhanced document retrieval. In this paper, the authors focus particularly on document retrieval applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the article related to social appropriation of knowledge related to scientific communities, governments and mass media is presented.

This paper presents the results of a study on the open archives in developing countries. It provides the elements of type, size and contents of open archives. The methodology is based on information collected from open repository websites. The survey is based on an almost exhaustive sample list of developing countries websites retrieved from directories and a list of open repositories. The purpose of this study, carried out from 2011 up to now, is to measure, at a second level, the impact of open access on the Algerian researchers by analyzing their practices related to open access, through the identification of their scientific publications at a second level in the open archives, in which they can deposit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a generic and flexible framework for building geoscientific metadata portals independent of content standards for metadata and protocols. Data can be harvested with commonly used protocols (e.g., Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and metadata standards like DIF or ISO 19115. The new Java-based portal software supports any XML encoding and makes metadata searchable through Apache Lucene. Software administrators are free to define searchable fields independent of their type using XPath. In addition, by extending the full-text search engine (FTS) Apache Lucene, we have significantly improved queries for numerical and date/time ranges by supplying a new trie-based algorithm, thus, enabling high-performance space/time retrievals in FTS-based geo portals. The harvested metadata are stored in separate indexes, which makes it possible to combine these into different portals. The portal-specific Java API and web service interface is highly flexible and supports custom front-ends for users, provides automatic query completion (AJAX), and dynamic visualization with conventional mapping tools. The software has been made freely available through the open source concept. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper attempts to analyse the growth and development of web-resources in Nuclear Science and Technology as reflected in the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) (1996-2005) database. During 1996-2005, a total of 102,720 publications appeared in 1,526 web-resources contributed by the nuclear scientists in various areas of research namely, Physics (52,590), Other Aspects of Nuclear and Non Nuclear Energy (23,148), Life and Environmental Sciences (13,843), Engineering and Technology (10,380), and Chemistry, Materials and Earth Sciences (2,759). The publications in web- resources have started appearing in the INIS database in 1996 with three publications. The highest number of publications in web-resources published were 25,813 in 2005. The average number of publications in web-resources published per year were 10,272. The top websites were http://www.iop.org with 30,711 publications, followed by https://www.osti.gov with 25,241 publications, and http://www.dx.doi.org with 8,569 publications. The websites with the domain name .org have published 51,602 followed by .gov wit/i 26,613 publications and .jp with 6,565 publications. !`fore than 91.8 percent of publications in web-resources were in English. More than 45 percent of the web- resources were published in journals followed by reports (41.66%). The most preferred web-journals by tile scientists were Journal of Physics-Condensed Matter with 6,677 publications, followed by Journal of Physics-A with 5,186 publications and Journal of High Energy Physics with 4,799 publications. Also analysed were the locations of web- resources in various fields in a record in the database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Federated Digital Libraries (FDLs) unify metadata from geographically distributed digital libraries and implement advanced information retrieval services for the users. Currently, the growing number of users and digital libraries on the World Wide Web (WWW) as well as the use of computationally intensive indexing and search algorithms causes scalability and performance problems. In order to build efficient and effective personalized FDLs, we developed a novel architecture and a system prototype, which is based on state-of-the-art grid technology. When using the system, the user selects a set of geographically distributed DLs. Then, the system harvests metadata from the selected DLs and computes and stores an index. Following this procedure, the user can use the generated index for searching her or his personalized FDL. It is shown that the proposed architecture is generic and scalable, and it can, as such, accommodate a number of different FDL applications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent technical advances have allowed for the emergence of different means for making information available through open access. Although these initiatives usually are non-profit, they still must respect intellectual property issues inherent to literary, technical or scientific works. This article offers some recommendations which, while respectful of authors' rights, can permit information to be made available in open access for the entire user community. Conscious of the many scenarios possible, we have focused on the creation of an institutional repository containing documents generated within the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Open access movement has attracted increased support over the past few years from both institutions and members of the scientific community. There has also been a growing interest in projects linked to open access initiatives. This article analyses the significance of open access—in accordance with the BOA1, Bethesda and Berlin declarations—to scientific publications on the internet. An overview is provided on issues related to the impact of open access resources and to the implications of copyright concessions in an open access environment. Finally, the future perspective of open access is evaluated from the standpoint of governmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CiteSeer, FirstGov for Science, and Scirus are freely available Web-based resources that provide access to bibliographic and full-text scientific content of potential value to scientists, health professionals, and librarians. These resources serve as no-risk, no-cost introductions to searching aggregated collections and understanding cross-database or federated searching, reduce the time and effort needed to find useful scientific information, and provide a superior alternative to using a general search engine such as Google. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an overview of open archives developed during the period of 2004–2012 in India including institutional, subject, cross repositories, etc. It also depicts the actions taken by the Indian government in response to the OA developments. The paper highlights that there are one cross institutional repository, three cross institutional electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) repositories, three subject repositories, five institutional ETD repositories, and twenty-five functional institutional repositories registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). It also gives an account of the National Knowledge Commission of India which has proposed a model to continue and expand the number of research papers being put in Open Access by establishing a specific fund for Open Access research. The paper provides the background to, and contemporary issues in, the development of open archives in India. It sum ups with the latest developments initiated by the Indian government, corporate organizations, etc. towards the success of the Open Access movement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

E-LIS (E-prints in library and information science) is an open archive devoted to library and information sciences. It is an international digital library that has functioned since January 2003, with the goal of spreading the open access philosophy within our community. Its characteristics and functionality are described briefly, as are the background and reasons for its creation. The article explains how the use of the GNU Eprints software was a determining factor in the archive's current structure. In concluding, E-LIS is promoted not only as a source of information for retrieving full text documents, but also as an example for the LIS community of open archives and of the changes that are affecting all scholarly communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As language data and associated technologies proliferate and as the language resources community expands, it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate and reuse existing resources. Are there any lexical resources for such-and-such a language? What tool works with transcripts in this particular format? What is a good format to use for linguistic data of this type? Questions like these dominate many mailing lists, since web search engines are an unreliable way to find language resources. This paper reports on a new digital infrastructure for discovering language resources being developed by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). At the core of OLAC is its metadata format, which is designed to facilitate description and discovery of all kinds of language resources, including data, tools, or advice. The paper describes OLAC metadata, its relationship to Dublin Core metadata, and its dissemination using the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly publishing is undergoing a profound transition from the traditional print media to the electronic media. This transition is almost complete from the reader's viewpoint. Authors, reviewers and librarians have yet to reap the expected benefits of increased efficiency and reduced costs. This article examines the possible consequences of this change, surveys recent developments and proposes an efficient organisation for future scholarly publishing. The new role of authors, reviewers, librarians and readers in this proposed organisation is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]