Policy Commons

Before Policy Commons and Applied Science Commons existed, they were a long-held dream of publisher Toby Green.

Toby began his career in traditional scholarly publishing, working with applied science publishers Pergamon and Elsevier from 1982 to 1997. In 1998, he joined the OECD and discovered a parallel world of research—produced by IGOs, NGOs, governments, and companies—that was not published in books or journals, but rather as reports and white papers. Librarians often remarked that this "grey literature" was often overlooked, hard to find, and poorly preserved.

Determined to solve the issue, Toby cofounded Coherent Digital in 2019. The company developed custom crawling, AI tools, and a robust search engine to build the Commons platform. Policy Commons launched in 2020 with 1.5 million items, and by early 2025 hosted over 18 million—and continued to grow. In 2025, Applied Science Commons launched as a discovery and preservation platform for grey literature in the applied sciences.

Neither platform could have been built without the help of hundreds of librarians and researchers, who have generously given their time to identify new organizations for inclusion. We invite you to join the community. If you know of organizations we don’t yet cover that would benefit from having their grey literature indexed and preserved by either platform, please get in touch with Toby at toby.green@coherentdigital.net.