Enhancing Visibility : Integrating Grey Literature in the SOWIPORT Information Cycle

Despite the fact that Grey Literature plays a key role in disseminating research results to the scientific community, it currently is not represented equally well in the established information landscape. While institutional information infrastructures supporting scholarly research (e.g. libraries or information centres) mostly focus on publications from traditional publishers or on what is published within their own institution, a parallel universe of services and servers for Grey Literature and Open Access publications has been established, which makes it hard for any user to only get an overview of what is available in his area of interest. Following a discipline-oriented approach, the newly established scientific information portal SOWIPORT not only integrates Grey Literature and Open Access publications from the social sciences with traditional ones, but also establishes support for the whole research lifecycle, where research, publication and discourse are interconnected and make use of the direct and electronic availability of these types of publications.