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Grey literature (or gray literature) is a type of information or research output produced by organisations, outside of commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports (annual, research, technical, project, etc.), working papers, government documents, and evaluations. Organisations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organisations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants. Grey literature may be made available to the public, or distributed privately within an organisation or group, and often lacks systematic means of distribution and collection. The standard of quality, review and production can also vary considerably. Grey literature is therefore often difficult to discover, access, and evaluate. ==Definitions== The concept of grey literature has gradually emerged since the 1970s. When Charles P. Auger published the first edition of his landmark work on "reports literature" in 1975, he did not use the term "grey literature". Nevertheless, his account of this "vast body of documents", with its "continuing increasing quantity", the "difficulty it presents to the librarian", its ambiguity between temporary character and durability, and its growing impact on scientific research, was entirely compatible with what is now called grey literature. While acknowledging the challenges of reports literature, he also recognized that it held a "number of advantages over other means of dissemination, including greater speed, greater flexibility and the opportunity to go into considerable detail if necessary". For Auger, reports were a "half-published" communication medium with a "complex interrelationship () scientific journals". In the second edition of his book, published in 1989, he adopted the term "grey literature".〔 The so-called "Luxembourg definition", discussed and approved at the Third International Conference on Grey Literature in 1997, defined grey literature as "that which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers". In 2004, at the Sixth Conference in New York, a postscript was added for purposes of clarification: grey literature is "...not controlled by commercial publishers, i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body". This definition has since been used extensively and is widely accepted. The U.S. Interagency Gray Literature Working Group (IGLWG), in its "Gray Information Functional Plan" of 1995, defined grey literature as "foreign or domestic open source material that usually is available through specialized channels and may not enter normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents". Other terms used for this material, both in the past and still today, include report literature, government publications, policy documents, fugitive literature, nonconventional literature, unpublished literature, non-traditional publications, and many others. With the introduction of desktop publishing and the internet, new terms added to the list include electronic publications, online publications, online resources, open access research, and digital documents. While the term grey literature is fairly obscure and difficult to define, it has the advantage of being an agreed collective term that researchers and information professionals can use to discuss this distinct but disparate group of resources. In 2010, D.J. Farace and J. Schöpfel pointed out that existing definitions of grey literature were predominantly economic, and argued that in a changing research environment, and with new channels of scientific communication, grey literature needed a new conceptual framework. They proposed a new definition ("Prague Definition"): "Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." Today, due to the overwhelming success of web publishing and access to documents, focus has shifted to quality, intellectual property, and curation. Without the revision mentioned above, the current definition risks becoming obsolete due to its inability to differentiate grey literature from other documents. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Grey literature」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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