At the onset of twenty-ten, Grey Literature emerged into the public arena after more than a quarter century in the corridors of libraries and in workplaces and meeting rooms of information practitioners and professionals. Grey Literature is now a topic of news in the world media. Coverage in magazines and newspapers e.g. Nature, New Scientist, The Economist, the Guardian, etc. carrying articles on the IPCC use/misuse of grey literature is current and in-depth. For those following these news threads, much of the publicity is less than complimentary. And, the grey literature community has not been hesitant in its response via blogs, listservs, distribution lists, etc.
During the coming months leading up to GL12, the international grey literature community will have the opportunity to bundle its efforts in order to address issues that stand at the core of grey literature and which have come under fire in the public media. One thing is certain, now that grey literature has entered the mainstream press, it will not simply disappear. It is now up to the corporate authors and publishers of grey literature as well as those organizations processing and distributing it both in print and electronic formats to address the misconceptions and unknowns about this field of information science. The Twelfth International Conference on Grey Literature will provide a global forum for stakeholders in government, academics, business and industry to come together on issues formulated in the GL12 Call-for-Papers. This year’s proposed themes accentuate the transparency in grey literature and the almost seamless processes of research, authorship, publication, indexing, as well as, the uses and applications to which it is exposed in knowledge based communities. Many of these processes are the same faced by commercial publishing, where only the differences lie in grey tech approaches to high tech issues.