In 2019, GeoScienceWorld were actively planning to bring a large content and data repository, that includes a significant proportion of highly valued grey literature, into our existing collection of 50+ peer reviewed journals and over 2300 books in the geosciences. Due to various external situations, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an absence of community accepted standards for grey literature publishing, this project has stalled. GeoScienceWorld continues to investigate opportunities to bring original datasets, as well as other collections of grey literature, predominantly in the form of partner societies’ conference proceedings and related conference materials, into our traditional research platform. We are also in the early stages of planning for a new research tool that will be truly content agnostic in bringing research and valuable insights to our primary end user stakeholders, researchers, whether in academia or industry. As an organization, GeoScienceWorld is further implementing an Agile mindset and development philosophy in order to bring increasingly useful, and timely, resources to our stakeholder groups. A key ceremony of all truly Agile development processes is the Retrospective. In this paper, I review the initial aims of the project to incorporate a large grey dataset into our traditional scholarly literature platform and provide reflections on how both GeoScienceWorld and the wider grey literature community can move forward to bring such valuable datasets to audiences that both want, and need, such content to advance their own research. For each element of the initial project, I ask the following Agile Retrospective questions: 1. What did we do well? 2. What could we have done better? 3. What have we learned? 4. What are we still puzzled by? As a result of applying these questions to the initial project, I will present recommendations that both inform GeoScienceWorld’s future integration and presentation of grey literature, as well as offer a clearer path toward greater grey literature acceptance within traditional scholarly platforms such as ours. |