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Just when you thought in-person conference cancellations were a thing of the past, TextRelease changed the 24th International Conference on Grey Literature-scheduled for Dec. 5-6, 2022, with the theme of Publishing Grey Literature in the Digital Century-to an entirely virtual event. In 2021, the 23rd conference, originally scheduled for Amsterdam, had to be virtual-only because of suddenly imposed health-related government mandates. This year, the in-person event, originally planned to be held on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, was canceled due to a worrying rise in COVID cases and construction at NIH, according to Dominic Farace, founder of GreyNet International and director of TextRelease. As with the previous year, conference sessions and poster presentations were prerecorded and made available on the TIB AV-Portal, an OA platform operated by the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) where science videos such as conference recordings, simulations, animations, lectures, and visualized research data can be published and viewed for free.
Publishing Grey Literature in the Digital Century
Just when you thought in-person conference cancellations were a thing of the past, TextRelease changed the 24th International Conference on Grey Literature-scheduled for Dec. 5-6, 2022, with the theme of Publishing Grey Literature in the Digital Century-to an entirely virtual event. In 2021, the 23rd conference, originally scheduled for Amsterdam, had to be virtual-only because of suddenly imposed health-related government mandates. This year, the in-person event, originally planned to be held on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, was canceled due to a worrying rise in COVID cases and construction at NIH, according to Dominic Farace, founder of GreyNet International and director of TextRelease. As with the previous year, conference sessions and poster presentations were prerecorded and made available on the TIB AV-Portal, an OA platform operated by the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) where science videos such as conference recordings,simulations, animations, lectures, and visualized research data can be published and viewed for free. Sven Strobel wrote about the portal for ILI365 in June 2022 ("Experience and Publish Scientific Videos With the TIB AV-Portal"; see the sidebar on the next page for the link).
As a brief refresher, grey literature is everything not published by traditional commercial or academic publishers. It could be reports, working papers, government documents, white papers, blog posts, preprints, and a host of other types of literature. In fact, as the internet becomes a quasi-publishing platform, the amount of grey literature has steadily increased, transcending the original description. What hasn't changed are the variations in quality and the challenges in discovering relevant literature for a specific research purpose. This is particularly important for academic researchers who must locate cutting-edge data and are concerned about publications conforming to FAIR (Find-able, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.
The conference featured 22 presentations, 10 posters, and 48 authors from 27 organizations and 13 countries. Given the ubiquity of grey literature, it's unfortunate that the 2022 conference attracted only 146 registered attendees-and that's for a free event with no travel costs incurred. The number of viewings of the presentations, however, has been strong: almost 800 as of mid-January 2023.
OPENING THE CONFERENCE
In her welcoming address, Patricia Flatley Brennan, director of the National Library of Medicine, noted NIH's commitment to open science and the FAIR principles. She also mentioned experiments with preprints and the promise of semantic mapping.
Daniella Lowenberg, on assignment from the University of California to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, delivered the keynote address, titled "Open for What? Looking Beyond 'Open' as the Goal for Data." She started from the premise that data is important, driving discovery and creating jobs. She decried researchers who say they will share their data but then don't. Moving on to data as evidence, she dismissed the notion that raw data is evidence. It's not enough to be existing, open, and archived with citations. The value of data lies in its usability. That means it should be machine readable, with comprehensive metadata, PIDs (permanent identifiers), accessible file formats, and data citations. Libraries can support data reuse.
In his opening address, Markus Stacker, from TIB, looked further into FAIR scientific information. His wasn't the most positive of views. Scientific literature has been digitized, but more in a scanning mode than one taking advantage of digital transformation. Text extraction for machine learning has been too much of manual process. The bright spots are standards for metadata and knowledge graph technologies.
CONFERENCE THEMES
Papers during the conference fell into themes around digital publishing, stakeholders and policies, and innovations and repurposing. Alistair Reece from Geo-ScienceWorld looked at the challenges of introducing grey literature into a scholarly publishing platform, relying on an Agile mindset and development philosophy. When considering grey literature, zines are rarely thought of. Andrea Marshall from the Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies changed my mind. Terming zines "autoethnographic serious literature," Marshall thinks that they, as rebellious artifacts that communicate radical ideas, reflect a modern DIY movement. They fit well into makerspaces and can be seen as a grey literature platform.
According to Tereza Simova from the Czech University of Life Sciences, pre-registration of research for theses might qualify as a new standard to deal with the replication problem in the social sciences. Advantages include research that is open, transparent, robust, and reliable as well as feedback to improve research design. Dobrica Savic, a knowledge management consultant who recently retired from IAEA, commented on information fatigue syndrome and its corollary, digital burnout. Fatigue symptoms include apathy, poor concentration, tension, relationship problems, irritability, feelings of helplessness, and a compulsive need to be connected to the internet. He suggested some solutions: Sharpen your focus, concentrate on essentials, prioritize, delegate, ask for help, learn to say no, and relax.
During the special panel session, Tomoko Y. Steen, from Georgetown University School of Medicine and retired from the Library of Congress, detailed some difficulties she encountered with archival materials. Often, they were not digitized and, even if they were, they were inaccessible and expensive. Fragility of archival materials often contributed to them not being digitized. Ethical issues also were a factor.
POSTER SESSIONS
The conference featured 10 posters. The winner was Bioeconomy and Grey Literature-Empirical Evidence, created by Marianne Duquenne, Helene Prost, and Joachim Schopfel from the University of Lille's GERICO Laboratory. Runners-up were Grey Is the New Black: Changing Library Instruction Virtually, by Aleksandra Blake and Margaret McLeod from Carleton University, and Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Research Corpus of Scholarly Big Data, by William A. Ingram, Jian Wu, and Edward A. Fox from Virginia Tech University Libraries.
Special recognition was given to TIB's Margret Plank for her years of service on the conference's program committee and her lead in establishing the media partnership that enables the conference presentations to be hosted on the TIB AV-Portal.
As for the 25th International Conference on Grey Literature, it will be held Nov. 13-14, 2023, in person (fingers crossed) in Amsterdam.
Marydee Ojala is editor of Online Searcher, now part of Computers in Libraries magazine, and ILI365 eNews. She has program development responsibilities for several Information Today, Inc. conferences. Send your comments about this article to [email protected] or tweet us (@ITINewsBreaks).
Copyright Information Today, Inc. Mar 2023