Open Access Italia 2010

The presentation is an update of the state of the art of Open Access in Italy which was illustrated during the 2009 Open Access Week. It covers the milestones of Open Access in Italy and the recommendations of the CRUI national Working Group that has recently reached the number of 60 members. It illustrates the CRUI WG agenda for the next three years which focuses on the following three issues: open courseware, open archive metadata, and a survey of the attitudes of Italian publishers towards OA with the aim to set up an Italian branch of the Sherpa-RoMEO database. The presentation deals also with the Open Access Week - an initiative to which many Italian institutions have participated and that has become a collaborative non-stop event linking different cultures and countries within a social network that is spreading widely thank to the opportunity of sharing suggestions, experiences and practical tools and solutions. At European and international events Italy does not appear to keep pace yet, in particular as regards institutional and official policies. However, after a period of slow growth – probably physiological -statistics on the state of OA in the world show a positive trend with an increasing number of documents archived within disciplinary repositories and new OA journals appearing every week. This positive trend provides us with some cues on possible new scenarios where new business models and publishing solutions - more advantageous for universities and research - may emerge