WorldWideScience.org – The
Global Science Gateway

Slide 1: WorldWideScience.org
Bringing Light to Grey

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

Introduction

Opening Remarks

Slide 2: 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

Slide 3: "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".

Slide 4: 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

Slide 5: 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

Slide 6: 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

Slide 7: Prominent Deep Web Search Engines

• Science.gov
• ScienceAccelerator.gov
• E-print Network
• Science Conference Proceedings
• Federal R&D Project Summaries

Slide 8: WorldWideScience.org – makes grey literature from around the world available Background/history of WWS.

Slide 9: WorldWideScience.org Databases/Portals

Slide 10: 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

Slide 11: 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)

Slide 12: 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

Slide 13: WorldWideScience Search Results

Slide 14: ETDEWEB Bibliographic Citation

Slide 15: OpenSIGLE, System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe

Slide 16: Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA-UiB)

Slide 17: CSIR Research Space (CSIR)

 

Slide 18: Journal of Agriculture and Environment, Vol 8 (2007)

Slide 19: Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT)

Slide 20: What’s Next for WWS.org?

• Overcoming scalability issues
• Offering alerts service
• Searching multilingual sources

Slide 21: Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM)

Slide 22: ICSTI Technical Projects

• Numeric Data
• Multimedia
• Web 2.0

Slide 23: Conclusions

Grey is…

• Global
• Growing
• Good… for science
  medicine
  technology