Institutional Archives for Research: Experiences and Projects in Open Access

Abstract

, 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;

Rowing upstream : promoting and disseminating LIS research in sub-Saharan Africa

“…The development of open access archives may improve global information dissemination and exchange (Chan, Kirsop & Arunachalam 2005). Open access creates new models of scholarly communication that are driven by technological changes (Giglia 2007). …”