The role of eprint archives in the access to, and dissemination of, scientific grey literature: LIZA - A case study by the National Library of Portugal

Grey literature is now universally recognized as an important information resource. For industrial and business organizations, it contains much knowledge and know-how that are vital business assets. Grey literature in an R&D environment can represent the cutting edge of this knowledge, so its efficient management is essential. The increasing possibilities brought about by electronic scholarly publishing, in the context of scholarly information communication, together with the developments of the World Wide Web, are the driving forces behind the implementation of projects for archiving, preservation and provision of access to electronic scientific grey literature collections. This paper discusses the significance of grey literature in an environment where the function of the scientific journal, as the privileged media for efficient dissemination of R&D results, has been under some criticism by researchers and scholars. A literature survey on digital grey literature access and preservation projects is summarized. The last part of the paper briefly outlines the main results of a survey on the attitudes and expectancies of researchers and academics in the Mathematics and Agricultural Sciences in Portugal, regarding the creation of a scientific grey literature archive by the National Library of Portugal - the LIZA initiative - allowing self-posting of articles in electronic media by the Portuguese academic and R&D communities.