Watch the VIDEO.The talk will present OPERAS, a comprehensive infrastructure aimed at providing a pan-European infrastructure to rethink and reshape publishing, discovery and dissemination addressing the specificity and the critical issues of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).OPERAS' aim is to meet the specific needs of SSH scholars in an open environment, taking care of all the steps of the scholarly communication cycle.OPERAS' unique approach is to unite researchers, libraries and publishers in a common effort, in order to take back control over scholarly communication. Not merging nor replacing, but nurturing existing realities, OPERAS provides innovative services to bring SSH into Open Science.OPERAS is designed to elaborate effective and scalable long-term strategies for the future development of the digital infrastructure and community building needed to innovate scholarly communication in the SSH. OPERAS' pervading idea of science as communication holds an immense potential for an inspiring model of Open Science with direct societal impact, based on continuous communication.

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The expert conference Open Access Open Data, held in Cologne (D) on December 13 th and 14 th 2010, represented a two-day intensive debate and exchange occasion. Excellent contributions by the invited speakers alternated with sharp and stimulating participants' interventions, in order to create an inspiring atmosphere. The common scenario being the changing scholarly communication system, we can try to follow some key insights emerging from the debate. Scholarly communication, digital age and the commonsDieter Stein (Düsseldorf University, D) highlighted the free nature of scholarly communication, and the yet unexploited potentiality of the Net: the concepts of access, visibility, impact, should have to be revisited in the perspective of an Open Science, where the "User Generated Content" calls for more "liquid" and "current" publications. Open Science stands for transparency and efficiency, made possible by the new ways of producing science, in which one can discuss and debate in the meanwhile science is processed, and not only at the end of the work, in front of a final "product". This new attitude should claim also for a revisited concept of copyright, because in the digital age there are no more paper objects to be possessed by anyone.On this path, Rainer Kuhlen (Konstanz University, D) developed a fascinating theory moving from the concept of knowledge as commons and coming to a "knowledge ecology", where sustainability of immaterial goods can only be achieved by open and free access and unrestricted use -on the opposite, natural resources are to be made scarce to be preserved. The knowledge ecology is aimed at achieving the goal of people-centered, inclusive and sustainable knowledge societies. In the "Commons" paradigm, this "knowledge ecology" -and in its context the idea of open access -provides an alternative both to existing commercial publishing models on the international information markets and to international copyright regulations: they both have mainly emphasized only the economic impact of knowledge and information. But it should also have to be taken into account the genuine character of knowledge as a common-pool resource. In this perspective, the "knowledge ecology" does not object to the commercial use of knowledge produced in public environments such as universities and research centers, but suggests that publishing models are only acceptable when they acknowledge the status of knowledge as a commons, allowing free and open access for everyone. This commons must be based on sharing knowledge, producing new knowledge collaboratively, and providing future generations with the same access and usage rights. As a result, the commercial use of publicly produced knowledge should be the exception and open and free access the default; there should be a need for compensating the public when the commons "knowledge" is exploited for commercial usage; there should be a need for new property right rules when knowledge is increasingly produced collaboratively: nobody should have an exclusive right on know...

, of the ISS, in different roles involved in the OA initiative. The congress was talking mainly to biomedical researchers, largely presents at the event together with information specialist, and had a high profile, with an English-speaking session on the first day, to offer an international frame, and an Italian-speaking session on the second day, to investigate the Italian reality. Being all the .ppt presentations available on E-LIS, we will focus mainly on the second session, to better understand what happens at a national level 1. Right to the researchers, and to the new pathways shown by Open Access (OA) towards a new scholarly communication was dedicated the first session, Open Access and authors: support from the international community, opened by Jean-Claude Guédon with a masterly historical excursus on the channels of the scholarly communication from the founding of the first scientific journals to the Web. The early "republic of letters" could now-making the most of the networked environment and the OA strategies-become a diffuse, democratic, freely accessible "republic of knowledge". Self-archiving and the publication in OA journals-which the author in his The "green" and the "gold" road to Open Access: the case for mixing and matching 2 pointed out as complementary to a mature open landscape-can achieve the widest dissemination of the information and the global growth of knowledge. Guédon's proposal was to create "symbolic value" on Institutional Repositories with a more diffuse mandate to deposit, to make them count as a new paradigm in research assessment. Derek Law, talking about Making science count: Open Access and its impact on the visibility of science 3 , supplied facts and figures to show the increasing awareness about OA in all fields, 1 Conference proceedings will be published by Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Presentations are accessible in E-LIS;

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