Grey in the R&D Process

The rate of acquisition of data, its structuring into information and its interpretation as knowledge is increasing rapidly. There are more active researchers now than ever and the output of white publications per researcher is increasing. The output of grey publications is orders of magnitude greater. Past techniques of experts (librarians) cataloguing manually with metadata each publication do not scale. The problem is to find ways to manage this resource. The hypothesis is in 4 parts: (a) that the R&D process itself provides some context for managing the information; (b) that linking the records of the process to the publications provides this context; (c) that questions of curation and provenance are addressed automatically in such an environment; (d) that such an environment integrates grey and white literature and other R&D outputs such as software, data, products and patents. At UiB the emphasis of the work has been on assessment of the research output - especially publications - linked in context with records of the researchers, their organisational units, and related CRIS (Current Research Information System) information (the FRIDA system which is mostly CERIF-compatible). At CCLRC the emphasis of the work has been on the production of an open access repository of publication outputs from the organisation (ePubs), linked to the CERIFcompatible CDR (Corporate Data Repository) CRIS and thus to other research outputs with associated metadata. The recording of the data provides the context including the workflow of the R&D process, history and provenance. Grey documents produced as early ideas are captured in a temporal and organisational context, just as well as white publications, via the linked repository. CERIF allows, in a multidimensional framework, deduction or induction of relationships between documents, for example between a grey internal report and a white published paper - and with other research outputs. Furthermore, relationships between documents can be expressed explicitly: references and / or citations can be recorded. In this way a rich context for understanding the R&D output is provided, including versions, history and provenance. Recording facts once in a structured R&D process environment and then re-using them in many ways reduces - by automated provision assistance - the need for user input of metadata to describe research outputs (especially grey literature) and thus addresses the scalability problem.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notesXAInternationa