May 23rd, 2023. Coherent Digital today released a new collection on the Policy Commons platform. World Cities curates and preserves hundreds of thousands of publications from over 1,000 cities worldwide.

The reports, research papers, statistical analysis, and other publications are hard to find and unstable, published on websites that are prone to broken links or disappearing altogether. Coherent assigns persistent links, so that the documents remain available and usable for research and teaching.

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Coherent's president, calls the documents "the greyest of the grey" because of their lack of discoverability, inconsistent metadata, and impermanence—the hardest policy documents to find. "Cities around the world generate extensive research, yet their work gets lost. This is our most ambitious grey-literature project to date."

Toby Green, founder of Policy Commons, adds, "This output shows how cities globally are approaching population growth, climate change, education, healthcare, public safety, immigration, and jobs. But without backup copies and permanent identifiers, this important policy is at risk of disappearing." The database is updated weekly and also reaches back to capture historical policy.

The resource finds and saves select content from major urban centers, with careful attention to the Global South. World Cities will continually grow, with an anticipated 500,000-document milestone by the end of 2023.

World Cities is the third project on the Policy Commons platform and is cross-searchable with Global Think Tanks and North American City Reports. Trials are available.

About Coherent Digital

Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. We find important content and make it useful. Through Coherent, information is saved, uniquely tagged, stabilized, and made discoverable. Coherent Digital publishes collections on its Commons platforms: Policy Commons, Africa Commons, History Commons, South Asia Commons, Mindscape Commons, and Canada Commons.