At last week’s NISO Open Research virtual conference, Toby Green of CoherentDigital.net described how the research of thousands of governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, research centers and think tanks is published in works without metadata, unique identifiers or other standards that that would enable it to be found in library catalogs or major search tools that many researchers use. Consequently, a vast body of research produced by experts, supported by data and reviewed, is lost to communities that could benefit from it. It is “on the dark side of the moon.”
Policy Commons is an initiative to work with these organizations to ingest, describe and index their research in ways that the public can find and use it. The database includes entries with links the text of over 2.5 million papers from thousands of organizations. Individuals cans register to search for and access content for free up to 25 searches per month; membership gives unlimited searching. Fees are collected from research groups and institutions for higher capacity to harvest, upload and organize their works. Any registered user can upload their own content.
The vision and goals of Policy Commons are worthy and its coverage is broad. It includes 317 works published in Mali and 1,801 from the Seychelles, for example. A user has multiple options for finding content – browsing by topic, identifying organizations, viewing publications or tables – and then applying filters for language, publication type, publisher type, year published, publisher country, and more. You can also conduct a simple or advanced search. The advanced search starts with title, summary or full-text search, after which you can limit by any or a combination of facets. I found 6 reports with “voting” in the title published in Dutch between 2010 -2021. To fully integrate with other catalogs and search tools, Policy Commons could make a broader contribution to knowledge management by applying and employing standard identifiers, such as those for digital objects, organizations and authors. With plenty of room for further development, it currently serves a need for high quality information retrieval.
