The editor behind Policy Commons
Toby Green (he/him)
Before Policy Commons became a reality, it was a dream of Publisher Toby Green for over a decade.
As Head of Publishing for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), Toby led the development and launch of the organization’s online repository, iLibrary. But iLibrary provided a solution for only the OECD itself, not the policy community as a whole.
After twenty years, Toby left OECD in 2019 to cofound Coherent Digital and started researching his ideas in earnest. Every librarian he consulted spoke of the challenges of finding, cataloging, and preserving policy grey literature.
The production team began work, and Policy Commons launched in November 2020. Behind the scenes, Policy Commons employs multiple custom-built crawling technologies, AI selection tools, extraction micro-services, and a powerful search engine, all running on Coherent Digital’s proprietary Commons platform. We continue to learn from our librarian partners, who are generous with their time.