Il ruolo della Grey Literature e della letteratura scientifica nella diffusione della conoscenza

In recent years, near to formal scientific literature, researchers have taken an interest in considering Grey Literature but... What is Grey Literature? This paper tries to discuss some issues on Grey Liter-ature and its role in scientific research and knowledge diffusion. Starting from the concepts of Grey Literature and Open Access, the present study shows as Gray Literature could improve knowledge spillovers for both researchers and society. However, some weaknesses of this typology of research production are evident and the Academic institutions should be consider to improve the collection and the diffusion of these kind of research products. Indeed, recent trends of scientific research underline as academic e non-academic experts pay even more attention to informal literature because it repre-sents seminal results of projects and, at the same time, specific type of outputs (e.g., blogs) conveys real sentiments or expressions of people. However, it is known that a reviewing process is necessary for considering these kinds of production as scientific because a validation check for correctness has been done. Clearly, the possibility to publish on the internet even more typologies of documents improves the knowledge diffusion but, at the same time, it is also reasonable that it is not possible to consider all these products as scientific outputs. From this consideration, the hard work for next years would be trying to organize Grey Literature and define which part of them could be considered as "white" for the scientific society.