OpenGrey

» see opengrey.eu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

OpenGrey closed on 1 December 2020, in a year when almost nobody was reading European library infrastructure announcements. I had never used it and would not have known it existed if a dead link had not pointed at it. The people it was built for were librarians and systematic reviewers, and even among them it was a tool you were told about rather than one you came across.

Grey literature is the plain name for a real category. A doctoral thesis, a technical report from a government lab, a conference paper that never made it into proceedings, a working document from a ministry: all of it is written, finished and citable, and none of it goes through a publisher who assigns it an ISBN and sells it. It is often the only record of a piece of work, and before the web it was close to unfindable unless you already knew which library in which country had a copy.

SIGLE was the European answer to that, started in 1980 and producing records from 1984 under a body called EAGLE, the European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation. Up to fifteen countries took part, mostly through national or major research libraries, each cataloging what its own institutions produced and pooling the result. By the end it held roughly 700,000 records covering science and technology, biomedicine, economics and the humanities, with enough detail to actually go and locate the physical document.

The network died before the database did. EAGLE's general assembly voted to liquidate in 2005 and input stopped that year. In December 2007 the French national technical information center, INIST-CNRS, took the records and put them on a DSpace repository on a server in Nancy, open to anyone with a browser. It was called OpenSIGLE then. The 2011 replatform gave it the name OpenGrey and better search.

~ the dossier ~

~ the only copy ~

A frozen database sounds like a weak thing to maintain for thirteen years, and it was the opposite. Nothing new was coming in, so every record in it was a pointer to a document from 2005 or earlier, which is precisely the window where this material is hardest to find by other means. Searching the open web for a 1991 Dutch government research report does not work. Searching an index built by the library that received the deposit does.

The Cochrane Handbook's section on grey literature databases listed it among the sources a systematic reviewer was expected to search, which is about as institutional as a recommendation gets. On that checklist it was the European entry.

~ December 2020 ~

INIST-CNRS gave notice that as of 1 December 2020 the OpenGrey repository would be discontinued and preserved as a closed archive. The preservation half was handled properly, which is more than most shutdowns manage. The database went to DANS EASY in the Netherlands, a certified data archive holding both the Nestor seal and CoreTrustSeal, where the whole thing can still be downloaded as a MySQL file. GreyNet moved its own contributed content out beforehand, to the GreyGuide portal run by ISTI-CNR in Italy.

No reason was given beyond the shape of the thing. A database nobody was adding to, serving a declining number of searches from inside a public institute with its own budget conversations. These do not usually survive a review.

~ the page that is left ~

The address still answers. What sits there is a small WordPress page written in the past tense, telling you that the system used to give open access to 700,000 bibliographical references and allowed you to export records and locate the documents. It lists a handful of archived top searches, and they are the strangest thing on it: a paper called Towards a Prague Definition of Grey Literature sits directly above a study of an Occitan scripta in the medieval kingdom of Navarre. Below those is the link to the Dutch archive.

The database is not lost and the search is. Anyone can download 700,000 records as a database dump, and nobody who needed one record out of them has a way to find it that takes less than an afternoon.

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