Open Access in Italy

Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other

Open Access Repositories

According to the DRIVER Inventory Study, the central gateway in Italy is PLEIADI. 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.

Open Access Organisations/Groups

See information on PLEIADI and PUMA above. The OA Working Group sposored by CRUI (Conference of the Rectors of Italian Universities. It intends to provide Italian universities with guidelines and a tool-kit offering practical and legal support for: A) managing and making theses available via OA IRs; b) creating OA Journal;

In December 2007 the Crui OA WG licensed the Guidelines to oa to ETD

In April 2009 The Crui Oa WG licensed the Guidelines OA and research assessment - Recommendation

and IR - Guidelines

Open Access Projects/Initiatives

Legal depostit of electronic theses at the National Libraries based on OAI-PMH. The project has started in january 2008

Wiki-Italia Open Access is now online. 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.

Open Access Journals

According to the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) there are 88 Italian Open Access Journal

Copyright

Researchers in the STM fields refer to Sherpa/Romeo, while researchers in the Humanities have no similar resources to look up to. They publish especially with Italian publishers, that haven't clear policies about open access. One of the next aims of the CRUI OA Working Group will be to gather the positions of Italian publishers about this issue.

Funding Policies

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Publishers and Open Access

Italian publishers haven't expressed any policy or position about OA. Some UP support Open Access

Current Local News & Events

Berlin 5 Open Access: from practice to impact. Padova 19-21 September, 2007

Open Access Week 2009

Other Topics

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Contributor's contact details

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Paola Galimberti CRUI OA Working Group