Policy Commons 2025 Open Collection

Coherent Digital not only rescues documents quickly and at scale, but we also ensure their long-term discoverability. We recently introduced the use of COIs (Content Object Identifiers); we assign permanent unique identifier to each item in Policy Commons. Materials are indexed in Google Scholar and discoverable in academic databases and research platforms. By enriching each document with detailed metadata, we enhance its value for research, teaching, and public engagement.

With a mission to preserve endangered content, Coherent Digital has a long history of leading efforts in this area. We've launched several global collections aimed at preserving government documents. The continually growing World Governments database now indexes 5.7 million government documents from around the world, while World Cities and Local Governments preserves millions of hard-to-find municipal reports.

Policy Commons 2025 Open Collection is our first Rescue-to-Open project.

For every customer dollar spent on current Policy Commons collections between now and December 31, 2025, we’ll rescue an endangered item, enrich it with metadata, and make it freely available to the world. The Rescue-to-Open business model will enable us to fund the rescue of millions of items and make them available for future scholars.

Coherent Digital is actively  inviting librarians, researchers, and the wider policy community to identify and contribute endangered websites, reports, datasets, podcasts, and other content in urgent need of preservation.

Please use the form embedded on this webpage to recommend URLs for rescuing—or reach out to Toby Green, Publisher, directly.

For security reasons, we require a simple registration to access the materials. This helps protect the integrity of the collection, prevent misuse, and ensure that important content remains accessible to those who need it. However, all materials will remain freely available to the public.

A Content Object Identifier (COI) is a unique, persistent identifier assigned to content such as grey literature, reports, blog posts, videos, and podcasts. Just as a phone number uniquely connects to one person or organization, a COI ensures that each piece of content can always be reliably discovered and cited by researchers. Coherent Digital assigns a COI to every item we index or ingest into our platform.

Watch this video to learn more.