A Geographical Visualization of the GL Community: a Snapshot

“Today, in the spirit of science, grey literature communities are called to demonstrate their know-how and merit to wider audiences” [D. Farace, 2011].This quotation stresses the important role of the several international organizations in producing and disseminating knowledge in the field of Grey Literature (GL): the paper aims to provide a first snapshot of the geographical distribution of GL organizations and their participation to the annual International Conference on Grey Literature over the time (in the period from 2003 to 2015. See List of Conferences on Table 2 ).Nowadays a visual representation of data is often associated with the traditional statistical graphs, in particular for representing complex phenomena by means of maps and diagrams, which allow a deeper and more focused analysis of the data. In our case the geographical representation of stakeholders in government, academics, business and industry aims at visualizing the GL community across the globe: it concerns 674 organizations which over the years have contributed to the development of a common vision on the most pressing issues of the field by using new paradigms such as Open Access and the social networks.Given this scenario the GL Community is visualized by name and country of the organization and by year, as documented by the GL List of Participating Organizations published in the thirteen GL Program Books which can be found on the GreyGuide site. The results are presented in the form of visual graphs, which confirm the international flavor of this field.