Friday, September 11, 2009

IssueLab.org: online publishing forum for non-profit research

As I have pointed out in several earlier posts, discovering and keeping up with grey literature that is not indexed by discipline-specific databases can be a challenging, yet rewarding, means of accessing valuable statistics and information. Issuelab.org is a publishing forum that aggregates and indexes literature from think tanks and other research-producing non-profits, making the process of searching grey literature on a variety of policy topics much easier.
From Issuelab's about page:
"Each year billions of charitable dollars are spent on nonprofit research, research which journalists, policy analysts, legislators, students, activists, and grant makers all rely on to effectively address complex social issues. And yet despite the widespread interest in this work and the billions of dollars spent each year to produce it, most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or archived in issue-specific information silos. The nonprofit sector clearly needs a better solution than the current piecemeal approach to managing and sharing one of its greatest assets, while journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, educators, and the general public need a much better solution for locating and accessing social research across issue areas. IssueLab is that solution."

IssueLab data is OAI-PMH compatible and harvestable by OAI aggregators. Research can also be accessed via RSS feeds for different topics of interest.

Issuelab also has an interesting blog about non-profit research- topics cover the research process, getting research seen, and relevant legislation on open data and open access initiatives.

This is a fantastic resource for librarians, researchers, policy makers, and anyone who is interested in complex social issues like poverty, global health, criminal justice and a variety of other fields. I hope to see it grow in the future.

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