We specialize in
Grey literature
Every year, policy organizations around the world publish tens of billions of dollars of research in the form of grey literature—hundreds of thousands of reports, studies, white papers, data sets, and other materials, all peer or expert reviewed. But the material is often not citable and tends to be underused. Policy Commons indexes and hosts over 17 million documents from 41,000 organizations, curating and preserving important reports like the George Floyd investigation for future generations. Hundreds of new reports are added every hour.
Primary sources
Left unpreserved and undigitized, primary-source content deteriorates, decays, and is at risk of being lost forever. History Commons includes over 5 million pages of newspapers, archival materials, letters, diaries, photographs, blogposts, podcasts, personal narratives, social media posts, and other critical historical documents. European collections contain content sourced from The National Archives (UK), available in digital format for the first time. North American collections, including Black and women's historical content from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, is sourced from Accessible Archives. The Social Justice and Culture series captures ephemeral new-media formats and preserves them.
Content from the Global South
Research shows that three out of five people live in the Global South—in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Oceania. Yet the Global South is severely underrepresented in academic libraries. As librarians around the world work to decolonize their collections, Coherent Digital has created several resources to close the representation gap. Africa Commons, for example, indexes and delivers over 500,000 African items from thousands of sources. It’s mobile friendly and can be viewed in more than 130 languages. We partner with African organizations to digitize and add new content.
New media
We index and license blogs, videos, and other materials in danger of disappearing. We use hashtags and editorial curation to identify content of lasting value and then preserve it.
Is Grey Literature Peer Reviewed?
Our products
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How we do it
We capture content
Our editors find and license important content. We combine manual and automated tools to index and preserve the materials. We respect content creators by linking to their websites and driving traffic to them.
We enrich content
We use human and artificial intelligence to add metadata, summaries, extract titles, and entities; identify languages; check links; and enrich in other ways. We constantly improve our cataloging as new technologies and techniques emerge.
We publish and share
We provide comprehensive indices with advanced search tools that help researchers and students find and analyze previously hidden content. We help librarians with a full suite of tools ranging from discovery system feeds to impact dashboards. Faculty and librarians can suggest links or publish content in less than a minute.
We engage
We provide free access to many resources. We’re indexed by Google Scholar and other search engines. We provide permanent identifiers, resource lists for syllabi, alert tools, and even custom portals with personal branding.
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