TREATING POLICY CONTENT AS A BODY OF LITERATURE

Policy Commons is addressing these issues. It aims to be a one-stop community platform for research from the world’s policy experts, think tanks, IGOs, and NGOs. Policy Commons is the first platform to treat policy publications as a body of literature in its own right, with tools to search it, cite it, understand its impact, catalog it, and preserve it for the long term. Policy Commons already has a copy of Change, or Go safe and sound and is in discussions with the unnamed IGO to preserve the grey literature that will be excluded from its new CMS.

To improve discovery and make it possible for this content to be included in library catalog systems, Policy Commons wraps each item with metadata, including a unique, persistent identifier. With permission, it also stores an archival copy in case the original goes missing from its owner’s website. Policy Commons has already indexed 3 million publications from thousands of policy organizations to create the largest publicly accessible discovery service for the policy community. To ensure currency, new content is added weekly—more than 92,000 items are from 2020, including 20,000 on COVID-19 and 9,400 on Black Lives Matter.

Policy content isn’t trying to hide. In fact, quite the reverse. To ensure that it makes an impact, policy organizations are extremely keen that their content is found by a broad audience, but search engines are tilted in favor of the established and the well-resourced. It’s no secret that competition to appear on the first page of public search engines’ results is intense. Even the best SEO experts struggle to keep up with search engines’ ever-changing algorithms. To be successful, the details have to be right—from the structure of the website to the content design; from its interplay with social media to it being in tune with its audience. This requires specialist skill, time, and effort—assets that most NGOs and think tanks lack.

This is why most struggle to reach beyond a narrow, stakeholder audience and why their content is so hard to find by a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners who need it for their studies and work. While large organizations like the World Bank or the EU benefit from having large, well-visited websites and can afford to employ SEO experts to boost their discoverability on public search engines, the long tail of policy organizations lacks the scale and skills to push onto the first page of search results—even in the organizations’ own disciplinary niche.

Take climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website attracts 400,000–500,000 visits monthly, and more than 5,300 sites link to it—it is plainly an 800-pound gorilla in climate policy and the type of website that gets boosted by public search engine algorithms. But what about the Production Gap website (productiongap.org)?

The Production Gap is an ongoing annual study by five well-known and highly respected IGOs and NGOs designed to “sound the alarm on the disconnect between countries’ energy plans and climate commitments.” If the IPCC is there to set the target, the Production Gap, launched in 2019, is one of the many vital tools to monitor progress and hold countries’ feet to the fire in reaching that target.

Unless you are in the climate change inner-circle, chances are, you’d never find the Production Gap because its website has such little traffic, it fails to score on tools like SimilarWeb and has just 43 inward links. Not helped by its vague title, this is a website that public search engine algorithms deprecate.

There are many, many more examples like this—valuable and vital policy content that’s really hard to find via public search engines because it languishes on small, often poorly designed and badly maintained, websites.

LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD

Policy Commons provides a level playing field for policy content. Every item is processed in the same way and wrapped with metadata comprising nine core fields: title, summary, topic, year, place, publishing organization and type, publication type, and language. Each item is also given a unique identifier. When possible, the search engine also includes the full text of each item. Tags are added using a controlled vocabulary that users can enrich. Boolean operators and facets speed up the process of zeroing-in on the content you need. In 2021, Policy Commons will integrate with LMS platforms such as Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas—another step in normalizing this content and bringing it into the mainstream.

Treating each item equally, regardless of the size or reputation of its owner, means content from small, little-known organizations has as much chance of rising to the top of search results as content from established, well-resourced players. In tests, researchers and analysts surprised themselves by finding new content in areas where they thought they had read everything that had been published.

Policy Commons is not the first to notice that order is needed in the chaos that is policy publishing. In 2009, the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies launched Policy Archive (policyarchive.org) and crowdsourced 30,000 items, many from now-defunct organizations. Unfortunately, funding ran out in 2012, and Policy Archive itself needed archiving. Canadian public policy is covered by deslibris (deslibris.ca), an aggregation of 80,000 books, publications, and documents, and Africa Portal (africaportal.org) brings together 9,000 reports and publications from NGOs and think tanks located in Africa. Policy Archive and deslibris are now included in Policy Commons and a conversation has started with Africa Portal to see if it too can be part of a one-stop platform for the policy community.

Working with the community

The community aspect of Policy Commons is important. While Policy Commons’ editors are identifying and working with IGOs and NGOs large and small, the sheer length of the long tail makes it impractical for everything to be done by us. Policy Commons invites registered users to upload content and links that they think would be valuable to their peers. This community approach sets Policy Commons apart from other repositories and aggregation services.

Policy Commons is set up to work with policy organizations to help drive traffic and attention their way. When a link is uploaded to Policy Commons, the content item is processed and added to the Policy Commons search index. This takes seconds. When the item is found by users, they can learn more from a summary page. Then, if they want to access the item itself, they are linked to the original website, where they can see and download the item in its original context. In this way, Policy Commons drives traffic to partner websites—a feature that will be of particular value to small and little-known organizations such as the Production Gap. However, if, for whatever reason, the link to the original website is broken, then, providing Policy Commons has permission, the user can download the item from Policy Commons’ archive of saved content.

Policy Commons is set up to speed up research and help users find unique content and new sources. It serves as an archive of deleted content and content from lost organizations, and, with your help, we plan to make thousands more reports safe. Throughout the course of 2021, Policy Commons will work with a larger set of partners to expand its content offering and launch a range of additional services, free and premium. The goal is to make it easier to find, follow, and be alerted to content from the world’s policy organizations that, unlike newly discovered frogs, primates, and whales, doesn’t make the headlines but is still vital for research and study into policies that improve the lives for all who live on our planet.