Perspectives
In the ongoing discussion on new business models of academic publishing, eScience and open access to public research results, non-commercial distribution channels will continue to play a central role as vectors of scientific communication, alongside commercial publishing.
Another question is about impact and usage. In the past, impact metrics were limited to citations and journals. Today, usage metrics offer new opportunities to measure impact of a large scale of digital resources, also on the individual item level. Tomorrow, these metrics will provide additional information on quality and popularity to the end user.
Open archives will offer more appropriate services and functions for at least some segments of grey literature if not for all. But bibliographic control of grey literature will remain problematic despite the trend toward standardization of digital documents. And the libraries, together with their scientific communities, need to find new forms for the fundamental functions of scientific publishing, applied to open repositories, non-commercial items and datasets.
Read more about this topic: Gray Literature