Twenty-Five Shades of Greycite: Semantics for referencing and preservation

TL;DR

This paper explores how semantic metadata can enhance referencing, preservation, and author incentives in grey literature, promoting richer, more interpretable scholarly documents.

Contribution

It introduces methods for embedding semantic metadata in grey literature to improve referencing, digital preservation, and author engagement.

Findings

Enhanced referencing through semantic metadata

Improved digital preservation and non-repudiation

Customisation of semantics for grey literature

Abstract

Semantic publishing can enable richer documents with clearer, computationally interpretable properties. For this vision to become reality, however, authors must benefit from this process, so that they are incentivised to add these semantics. Moreover, the publication process that generates final content must allow and enable this semantic content. Here we focus on author-led or "grey" literature, which uses a convenient and simple publication pipeline. We describe how we have used metadata in articles to enable richer referencing of these articles and how we have customised the addition of these semantics to articles. Finally, we describe how we use the same semantics to aid in digital preservation and non-repudiability of research articles.