PIDfest 26

Your PID infrastructure almost certainly leaves grey literature behind. This matters, and the consequences are bigger than you might think — because you cannot keep knowledge connected if half the knowledge ecosystem has no persistent identifiers.
Your institution is probably producing more grey literature than you realise: reports, working papers, case studies, technical papers, blogs, podcasts, and videos . . . the list is long. What's certain is that grey literature — government reports, policy documents, intergovernmental assessments, technical publications — underpins some of the world's most consequential decisions, yet remains largely invisible to PID systems. An analysis of citations across the first six chapters of the last IPCC Climate Assessment Report (AR6) shows that fewer than 5% of citations reference grey literature, and 15% of those grey literature links are already broken. The IPCC has confirmed that this underrepresentation wasn't deliberate: contributors simply found it easier to locate, manage, and cite content that carries a DOI. When infrastructure favours journal articles, knowledge graphs follow — and the evidence base for global policy quietly narrows.
There is a second, equally pressing problem. Universities and research institutions are under growing pressure to demonstrate the real-world impact of their research — not just within the academy, but in government, corporate, and third-sector settings. Journal-to-journal citation tracking is well-established, but it only tells you what other researchers thought of your work. To understand whether your research is shaping policy, informing regulation, or influencing practice, you need to track journal-to-grey-literature citations. And to do that reliably and at scale, you need grey literature PIDs. Without them, the connection between academic knowledge and the world it influences remains invisible.
In this session you will discover how Content Object Identifiers (COIs), PIDs built specifically for grey literature and deployed across two very large grey literature platforms, Policy Commons and Applied Science Commons, are tackling this gap at scale. You will leave with:

A clear understanding of why grey literature falls through the cracks of existing PID infrastructure, and why this is both a bibliodiversity problem and a research impact problem worth solving.
A concrete example of how purpose-built PIDs can be assigned to millions of grey literature documents without complex workflows or high costs.
Practical insight into how better PID coverage of grey literature strengthens citation integrity, unlocks real-world impact measurement, and keeps the full knowledge ecosystem — not just the journal literature — connected and findable for the long term.