[rclis] Open Access in Italy

[Antonella De Robbio (antonella.derobbio at unipd.it)]

Dear Friends,

On November 4th-5th 2004 thirty-two Italian universities (more
than 40% of the Italian universities) gathered in Messina,
Sicilia (Italy) to sign the "Messina Declaration", and
committed to sign the Berlin Declaration.

Actually the conference was a great success, with more than
250 attendants and representatives from a majority of Italian
universities (rector's delegates, professors, university
librarians, IT people involved in OA).
The President of the CRUI Committee for University Libraries,
Prof. Vincenzo Milanesi, Rector of Padua University, had a
major role in convincing his colleagues to support the
initiative.
The event promoted by the Council of the Italian Rectors
(CRUI) was covered by the local media and it has been reported
internationally too (the event was reported in Peter Suber's
blog.
We expect that even more universities will sign in the next
few weeks (we are working on this front), since some of them
reported their impossibility to express an official position at
the moment, but a strong intention to do it soon.
We decided that the signatures of rectors to the Berlin
Declaration will be collected by CRUI in Rome and then sent
to Berlin all together.
They will be individually expressed by the universities, but
we think it is better to send them together as a
sign of the Italian presence in the Open Access world.

The impressive amount of signatories will have a significant
impact on the promotion of Open Access in Italy and probably
also abroad. It has been a great start to promote Open Archives
in Italy. We did not expect to get such a prompt response by
the Italian rectors. Now there is the necessary support to work
at tools and strategies to make OA happen in our country.

The event was divided in two parts: the first part (the first
day) was more political, Fred Friend, David Prosser and JC
Guedon gave their speeches as an introduction to the issues,
thanks to OSI and SPARC Europe which to have supported the
event through the participation of these three foreigner guests.
Aftwords the rectors of Messina (host of the event) and the
President of the Library Comittee of the Council of Italian
Rectors gave their speeches, made the statement(Messina
Declaration) in support of the Berlin Declaration before
the local media followed by the signature of each delegate
of the 32 universities.
The second part, on second day, was more technical.
A workshop was held where IT people, librarians discussed
and exchanged information about the institutional repositories
set up in Italian universities, the new projects and services
related to OA, copyright issues, metadata
quality, sustainable business model for OA journals.

On the web site
http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=1
there are several materials about the event:
the "Messina Declaration", the list of signatories,
a press release (very soon also in English), the list of
participants.
Last but not least, OA presentations (some in English).

A national committee worked to achieve this:
Benedetta Alosi and Nunzio Femmino'
(and their staff at the University of Messina),
Paolo Bellini (Trento),
Valentina Comba (Bologna),
Patrizia Cotoneschi (Firenze),
Antonella De Robbio (Padova),
Paola Gargiulo (CASPUR),
Ezio Tarantino (Rome),
Susanna Mornati(CILEA).

Cheers
Antonella De Robbio
University of Padua - Italy
Responsibile for University Digital Library
and Open Archives Section