In this email interview for Open Interview, Toby Green shares his ideas and thoughts with Gopakumar V and Siddu Huded, on collecting and facilitating grey literature for the scholarly community. He discusses how grey literature is becoming a feature, rather than being a bug  in scholarly communication and how the Policy Commons initiative has been active in different regions of the world in the grey literature domain.  He also talks on why Coherent Digital is seeking relationships with Google Scholar, EBSCO and Clarivate and libraries to reach out to the mainstream users so they can discover a new world of informally published content.

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Toby Green is a Cofounder of Coherent Digital. Before Policy Commons initiative became a reality, it was a dream of Toby for over a decade. As Head of Publishing for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Toby led the development and launch of the organization’s online repository, iLibrary. After twenty years, Toby left OECD in 2019 to cofound Coherent Digital. Every librarian he consulted spoke of the challenges of finding, cataloguing, and preserving policy grey literature. The production team began work, and Policy Commons launched in November 2020. Behind the scenes, Policy Commons employs multiple custom-built crawling technologies, AI tools, extraction micro-services, and a powerful search engine, all running on Coherent Digital’s proprietary Commons platform.

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Toby Green: We are indexing grey literature at scale for the larger benefit of scholarly community
https://openinterview.org/2025/04/24/toby-green-we-are-indexing-grey-literature-at-scale-for-the-larger-benefit-of-scholarly-community/

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