Towards a new scenary for research assessment: the institutional repository (AIR) of Milan University

The aim of this work is to report about the unconventional use of an institutional repository, that has been used as data source to assess the scientific production and productivity within the Departments of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Milan. The analysis of the results of the pilot shows that the archive and the data manager are a valid instrument to aggregate and analyze large quantities of bibliographic metadata, so the pilot can be extended to the whole university. A comparison with other universities is difficult since the use of institutional respositories is not so widespread, and there is no security on the coverage and the comprehensiveness of the data inside them. To conclude, there is a strong necessity to widen the presence and the usage of institutional repositories, according to the Recommendations of the Conference of the Rectors of Italian Universities (CRUI), and to update methodologies and processes of evaluation considering new models of production, fruition, and dissemination of scientific outputs. Moreover, the open access approach not only widens the potentialities of an easier access to information, but modifies the fruition of the information itself. The evaluative scenario must adapt to the new circumstances, as well as web circulation of the information has modified the measurability of contents with respect to the results in the publications themselves