23 October 2023
Coherent Digital has announced World Governments. The new database captures and enriches reports and other items of research interest from more than 150 governments around the world.
World Governments will join Coherent’s World Cities, North American City Reports, and Global Think Tanks on the Policy Commons platform. Collectively, the cross-searchable databases will comprise more than 10 million items by the end of 2023. Policy Commons has more than 100,000 registered individual researchers across hundreds of organizations.
Toby Green, Publisher for Policy Commons, emphasized the unique value of World Governments: "We’ve been carefully selecting reports for their scientific, technical, political, social, and academic value to scholars. We've also integrated tools to assist in determining research impacts, locating and extracting tabular data, and seamlessly incorporating this material into library catalogs and syllabi so that it’s part of scholarly literature as a whole.”
As is standard within Policy Commons, every item will receive a unique, persistent identifier. World Governments will also include a full suite of library tools such as COUNTER-compliant statistics, advanced search operators, and MARC records. Coherent also preserves copies in case reports are deleted or moved from websites.
Green went on, “We thank the many government document librarians who’ve helped us find agencies, archives, national commissions, tribal councils, commissions, and other organizations that are typically absent from most government repositories. This resource will not only help make it easy for scholars to find content hidden across hundreds of niche government websites, it will help preserve much of that material for the long run.”
World Governments will be introduced as part of the series of modules on the Policy Commons platform. It’s available for purchase or subscription by libraries, corporations, and other scientific and policy organizations—but anyone can accept Coherent Digital’s offer of free limited access at https://policycommons.net. “We extend our warm welcome to all interested individuals,” said Green.