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Discover 3.4 Million pages of grey literature central to policy research.

Policy Commons is a one-stop online discovery service for objective, quality and current research publications from a number of the world’s leading think tanks, policy experts, NGOs and more. With over 24,000 organisations contributing to Policy Commons, in partnership with Coherent Digital, it is one of the largest grey literature repositories around.

Policy Commons makes content, policy researchers can’t find in the scholarly records, findable.

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Coverage of major and minor organisations:

With a magnifying glass that spans international organisations, Policy Commons highlights and comprehensively indexes content from authoritative sources, with full-text coverage for 7,500 organisations, including smaller organisations deprecated by search engines.

An eye on Africa:

With over 850 organisations, over 23 think tanks, and more than 63,000 reports, Policy Commons has a sizeable and steadily growing content base of Africa-centric materials.

Making elusive entities visible:

Specialised coverage of over 1,000 hard-to-find NGOs, NPOs and research centres.

Preserving what’s important:

Every record housed in the Policy Commons database has its own persistent identifier, enabling you to cite materials with confidence. In addition, a preservation bank of 2.7 million saved copies preserves these materials for the future.

Resource centre:

Download brochures, videos and articles relating to Policy Commons.

BENEFITS OF MEMBERSHIP

Policy Commons provides limited open resources following free registration. But, with a Policy Commons Membership, you’ll gain access to unique search and content integration tools offering:

Access to over 500,000 pieces of premium, licensed content from several think tanks and other organisations.
Access to over 500,000 preserved documents from just under 480 organisations which have disappeared.
The inclusion of member think tank and research institute content to showcase their output on a premier grey literature platform.

Feature-filled, current and diverse, Policy Commons adds research value through tools that:

Search and interrogate content

Advanced search tools surface content in a manner that allows for analysing trends and identifying new research and policy partners.

Find and cite tables

Thumbnails of tables and graphs can be viewed within reports, with the option to browse, cite or download them directly.

Create and share reading lists

Your selected audience has access through a personalised, high-functioning landing page to customised lists of topics, reports, organisations or searches.

Fully deploy policy research in your organisation

All materials have a permanent ID and organisation-level MARC records. Content is indexed by major search engines and linked with library discovery services.

Personalise alerts

With customisable alerts, users can stay up to date with what really matters to them, receiving emails highlighting new materials as they are added to the database.