Italy
Most of the Italian universities have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
The Rectors of Italian State and Private Universities (CRUI) has created a working group on Open Access to prepare recommendations for Italian universities on open access. CRUI and the University of Padua organised the Berlin V conference on Open Access that took place in September 19-21, 2007.
The PLEIADI project is a portal for Italian scholarly e-literature in open archives and institutional repositories. The PLEIADI(Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali - a portal for Italian scholarly literature in open archives and institutional repositories) Project originated from the collaboration between two major Italian university consortia, CASPUR and CILEA, within the framework of the AEPIC project. PLEIADI aims at building a national platform that offers centralized access to the scholarly literature archived in Italian repositories. Another important portal is PUMA, the central portal to the repositories of 24 institutes of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).
In Italy there are 38 IRs mainly gathering conference and workshop papers and e-theses, but most of them are poorly populated due to the lack of information about these instruments as well as fear about copyright infringments.
In terms of initiaves, there is the legal deposit for electronic theses
to be deposited to the National Libraries based on OAI-PMH. The project
started in January 2008.
Also Wiki-Italia
Open Access is now online. The main aim of the wiki is to provide
an introduction to OA for "beginners", but even detailed information
for researchers and other stakeholders (librarians, repository managers,
administrators]. Particularly attention was devoted to copyright issues.
The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.
Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.
Last updated: 14-Nov-2008