Synopsis publishing for improving the accessibility of 'grey' scholarly information

Abstract

In the 1970s, synopsis publishing was one of the topics raised in discussions on the future of primary communication. Tradi tional publishing practices were widely felt to be inefficient for users and producers alike. Since economic constraints were the main incentive for most synopsis publishing experiments, inter est in this idea faded away when journal publishers no longer felt that their journals' future was jeopardized, though author resistance was the main cause of the early discontinuation of many of these experiments. In this paper a plea is made for the virtues of synopsis publishing, not only as an economic necess ity but also for fundamental reasons, for the possibility it gives to separate physically the access, dissemination and archival functions of primary journals. Several attempts have been, and are being, made to improve the accessibility and availability of 'grey' scholarly literature, a large proportion of the world's scientific literature. Thus paper discusses some of these attempts and suggests that the dissemi nation function could be improved by bridging the gap between the bibliographic information in databases and the full docu ments in depositories. Most experiments in synopsis publishing so far have been based on full papers used as back-up for the synopses; the full papers were either published in mini- or microform, or made available on request. Grey literature as back-up to synopses has hardly been discussed in the literature, and the only standard on synopsis publishing issued so far treats this possibility only in an aside. This paper discusses the applicability of the synop sis publishing principle to grey reports and concludes that such ventures are likely to meet less disapproval and resistance from authors and other parties involved than are article-based sys tems. In 1984, Pudoc established the Netherlands Agricultural Report Depository (NARD), a venture in synopsis publishing based on Dutch unpublished reports in agriculture and (ap plied) biology. NARD's approach, procedures and early results are briefly discussed.