Grey Literature in European Commission Projects
The latest recommendations issued by the European Commission go towards the revision of their policy on dissemination and preservation of scientific information: the aim is to promote access to the results of the community-funded research by especially implementing the open access policy within 'Horizon 2020', the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). The growth of "fast" documentation - which is not long-term preserved or not available in stable URLs and repositories - pushed the European Commission to produce a set of guidelines for the management of documentation at-large and of specialized documentation produced within funded projects in particular. Those guidelines try to conciliate the visibility of the project activities in two directions: "a) better quality and user-friendliness of project websites, triggering higher popolarity b) better visibility for the projects and the European Commission due to a more standardized format". The EC guidelines proved to be a very useful tool for optimizing and handling information on the dedicated portals of the community-funded projects: the general recommendations, for example, focus the attention on the importance of using social media as well as webmaster tools and virtual meeting facilities (as web streaming) and of adopting an "eu" domain. Moreover, specific directives are given not only for the structure of the project homepage but often for the web site framework as well: homepage, project overview, consortium, management structure, scientific methodology and expected documentation. Given this scenario, the web sites of these projects represent an essential vehicle for both the acquisition and the diffusion of grey literature and could also become an important resource within an European infrastructure able to overcome the disconnected and scattered nature of their content in order to optimise their riutilization. Although the term "grey literature" (GL) has never been explicitly mentioned in the Commission guidelines, it is widely known that a good amount of documentation produced within the EC projects is made up of deliverables, e-newsletters, brochures, posters, flyers, videos, project factsheets, photographs. Starting from this condition, this paper analyses the GL production available on European Projects dedicated web sites, using a sample of projects selected from EU-CORDIS. The aim of the survey is then to identify, measure, evaluate the usability and availability of grey literature provided by the European Commission projects web sites in order to verify whether this type of literature is compliant with EU recommendations. It is also important to assess to which extent grey literature is reusable for "nourishing" the European platform infrastructures devoted to the storage, dissemination and conservation of such research product.