The Grey biomedical information: how to search it and how to make it available

Researchers have always used personal communication ways supported by documents to promote a faster and informal circulation of the information. These documents, identified as Grey Literature, are often essential for the knowledge transmission; infact, for their non-marketability, they often give an added value to information because they are frequently equipped with tables and technical data which cannot be usually published. In the bio-medicai field this type of documentation is based since ages on relationships established among researchers who work together on the same project. But, recently, we noted an increase medicine and biology Grey Literature which replaces the indifference of many scientists for non-published materials; this refusal of non-commercial publications was mostly due to the poor opinion they bave about reports compared to the so-called 'open literature'. Neverthless this new typology of information has so large diffusion among research centres (technical reports), Universities (Doctor's Degree dissertations ), hospital institutions (protocol application. and diagnostic informations) that it constitutes a solid base for biomedical communication. These primary documents of high scientific value are today object of fond attention not only from the research world but also from the economie and industriai world for which represent a unique channel of scientific information. The CNR Central Library, as Italian Centre for Grey Literature (SIGLE) set up collaborations with the most important scientific italian institutes as well as pharmaceutical industries and agencies; this led to the creation of a national database, established in the "Guglielmo Marconi" Library, whose goal is to collect all kind of grey biomedical documents published in Italy and whose input represents the state of the art in Italian biomedical information map. Therefore, in consequence of the increasing biomedical information diffusion, the outline of the records stored in the database is becoming more and more complex, containing also academic notes, lectures, and congress communications which give a real value to researchers, physicians, biologists and hospital staff who are working in the benefit of the quality of life.