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An analysis of management in recent years for the National Library of Argentina, discussed current state and prospects of planning for the improvement and preservation of historical documents and reconditioning work of various sectors.

Introduction: Current era in which new technologies and the Internet are the communication medium has led many libraries to offer information and provide their services through these medium and / or tools. Objective: Analyze the visibility on the web of libraries health sciences Spanish hospitals and provides information to users. Material and methods: We have analyzed the current situation. Sample includes those public hospitals that have web page, institutional or non institutional, for the library service. We have conducted a trawl or browsing through the Internet in order to determine which sites had web page and wich services had been offered. Results: Number of sites visited and recovered is 124, with links available on the National Catalogue of Hospitals page of the Ministery of Health and the Catalog of journals in Libraries Health Sciences (C17). It has been analyzed the presence or absence of information, digital services, their types, which one are the most frecuent: general information (schedules, directories, regulations...) interlibrary loan, access to catalogs, databases, electronic journals, other services such as training users, news

The "Library 24 hours," Service created as a project of SIBUTEM, to give their students equal opportunities in access to information and comforable for study periods of semester exams.

Science Commons serves the advancement of science by contributing to the removal of unnecessary legal and technical barriers to scientific collaboration and innovation. Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle. The long term vision of Science Commons is to provide more than just useful contracts. We will combine our publishing, data, and licensing approaches to develop solutions for a truly integrated and streamlined research process.

In the language of e-learning, teaching and learning contents are often organized in ‘learning objects’: molecular assets that may consist of texts, audio or video lessons, presentations, tutorials, self-evaluation tests, all adequately described and packaged. The idea that open access could and should be applied to learning materials is not new: recent initiatives such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare or Open University’s OpenLearn are clearly moving toward the right direction. However, the problem of the repositories to be used in order to collect, describe, preserve and distribute open access learning assets is still an open one. Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) are the tools of choice in centralized management of learning assets, but while most LCMS adopt well-established standards for metadata (Learning Object Metadata – LOM) and packaging (SCORM) of learning objects, few of them explicitly address the problem of metadata harvesting by adopting the OAI-PMH protocol. On the other hand, most institutional repositories based on OAI-PMH do not address the specific problem of learning content metadata, for which the Dublin Core metadata scheme is painfully inadequate. The optimal solution seems therefore that of integrating basic LCMS features within existing Open Archives, allowing for both CD and LOM metadata handling and harvesting. This would also have the effect of actively promoting open access distribution for learning contents, by using a widespread and successful paradigm for their distribution. The paper will suggest a relatively simple model for such an integration.

The Italian Ministry of Health launched in 2001 a national program to support “independent information”. The dissemination included the translation and free distribution to all health professionals (300.000) of three reference books – British National Formulary; Medicines for Children and Clinical Evidence. The implementation plan includes the development of a free-access e-learning Continuing Medical Education (CME) system, based on Clinical Evidence, called ECCE. Doctors have access to a Clinical Evidence electronic version and related clinical vignettes. Solving the vignettes provides CME credits. Our objective was to understand the factors influencing knowledge transfer using a CME distance programme, based on clinical vignettes driven by the Clinical Evidence in general medical practice. As of June 10th 2007, more than 30 000 doctors voluntarily subscribed to ECCE (11.8%). Two surveys assessed doctors’ judgement about Clinical Evidence and ECCE. Free distribution and implementation of Clinical Evidence to Italian doctors have been well received, confirming their preference for problem-driven information and the key-role of a strong endorsement from Health Authorities for their implementation.

Recent reform processes affecting European and national research systems (mostly Higher Education and Public Research Institutes) enhanced the need of research evaluation as Government steering tool as well as mean for supporting allocation of public financial resources. Moreover, different methodologies for ranking Universities at international level on the basis of research quality are emerging, pushing institutions toward improving their visibility through the search of excellence. In both cases, peer review and bibliometrics are the chosen methods. The paper wants to discuss how considering concepts and means related to the Open Access (OA) context can influence these practices. Questions addressed are: how can peer review be implemented according to the OA initiative? Are there new tools other than bibliometrics, which can be used in order to reinforce peers’ outcome? Evidences from the Research Evaluation Exercise (VTR) recently developed in Italy by the National Committee for the Evaluation of Research (CIVR) will be presented.

While open access archiving and publishing are already common practices in many scientific, technical and medical (STM) fields, we cannot say the same for the humanities - especially in Italy. It is true that "information wants to be free" and ideas spread also in spite of all the copyright and closed access obstructions. However, the by-product of a such a situation is what we can call an incomplete library, which exacerbates the typical fragmentation of these disciplines. At the beginnings of Western philosophy, Plato dealt with the transition from orality to literacy, and met the challenge by combining freedom of the texts and knowledge communities. Now humanities have to face a similar challenge. And their fragmentation and lateness in the open access publishing can offer the opportunity to try out new filtering criteria, like open peer review, retroactive peer review and soft peer review. Outside the scientific community, a new kind of peer reviewing is emerging on-line - a kind of wisdom of the crowds that applies to de facto open access objects (see Chris Anderson, Wisdom of the crowds ). Although such a wisdom is not flawless, for humanities - which deal with human beings - it is crucial to communicate and to energize the new. cultivated public opinion that is arising from the Internet, if they want to preserve their eminence In a situation if information abundance, the well-known academic motto "publish or perish" might also be interpreted as "make your texts public, or perish".

High Energy Physics (HEP) spearheaded the Open Access dissemination of scientific results with the mass mailing of preprints in the pre-WWW era and with the launch of the arXiv.org repository at the dawn of the '90s. The community is now ready for a further push to Open Access while retaining all the advantages of its peer-review system. CERN, the world leading HEP laboratory which gave to the world the WWW, has now taken the lead in furthering Open Access publishing, leveraging on its experience and assets in world-wide collaboration. In recent months, HEP funding agencies, laboratories and library consortia joined forces to establish a single body, called SCOAP3: the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP3 will engage scientific publishers towards building a sustainable model for Open Access publishing, transparent for HEP authors. In the SCOAP3 model, subscription fees from multiple institutions are replaced with contracts with publishers of Open Access journals where SCOAP3 is a single financial partner. The publishers' role of assuring the high quality of published scientific literature through the peer-review system is at the basis of this model. Publishers would receive financial compensation for the costs incurred in the organisation of the peer-review service, while assuring Open Access to the accepted articles. We discuss the HEP publishing landscape and its links to the Open Access tenets leading to the basis of the SCOAP3 model. An outline for the transition of the entire HEP corpus to Open Access is then presented and the recent steps towards the establishment of SCOAP3 are reviewed.

Over the last years, the CRUI (Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane) has acknowledged the importance of full and open access to information and data belonging to the public domain for scientific research and education. Therefore, it has been fostering the web dissemination of scientific knowledge produced by Italian Universities and Research Institutions. In November 2004, the CRUI promoted the agreement of the Italian Universities to the "Berlin Declaration to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities", on the occasion of the Messina Conference on "Italian Universities for Open Access: towards open access for scholarly literature", in order to spread the advantages generated by open-access publishing. At the beginning of 2006, within the CRUI Libraries Commission, the Italian Group for Open Access has been set up, targeted at carrying out the principles of the Berlin Declaration. This Group is drawing up the guidelines, in order to make the academic community aware of the advantages due to Open Access, and to provide definite indications for the creation of open archives and the actualization of e-publishing initiatives. More precisely, the group is working on the laws and the ways of publishing Ph.D. dissertations in the archives.

Since the aim of Open Access is the removal of any economic, technical and legal barrier to the access to peer-reviewed published output of research, the creation and implementation of Rights Management Policies in higher education is a strategic issue for an effective and really practice Open Access endorsement. Italian Universities' priority should be the identification of stakeholders and the allocation of their own interests. A policy statements should explain in a very clear way how each faculty member's ownership should accomplish their digital scholarly material ensuring that the availability and the accessibility of this material is not adversely affected by the copyright. Policies on Open Access should be a fundamental part of the mission of our Universities, because it is involved in any process from creation to dissemination of scholarly works; for this reason University policies should balance the interests of stakeholders - reserving rights or benefits for research uses or teaching activities and ensuring that the work it funds can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. Managing copyright is a skill to be created. A variety of approach can exist even within one country, depending by laws or by habits to faculties. Copyright laws are inadequate to deal with the complex issues surrounding the management of intellectual works created at Universities. On Government side we need new legislations such as specific laws for the scholarship communication world. Nowadays the copyright is perceived as a very strong legal barrier for research and teaching, because copyright laws influence in a negative way the dissemination and the consequent impact of intellectual research output, with heavy cultural, social and economic relapses. On the administrative side we have to work inside our University. We need different levels of policies which foresee agreements that seek to assure to University and to its authors the ability to use and manage the works in fulfilment of their most important interests.

The Data, Data Analysis, and Visualization plan of the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery (see http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728/nsf0728.pdf) provides a framework in which NSF will work with its partners in the public, private, and international sectors to address data acquisition, access, usage, stewardship and management challenges in a comprehensive way. Motivated by a vision in which science and engineering digital data are routinely deposited in well-documented form, are regularly and easily consulted and analyzed by specialists and non-specialists alike, are openly accessible while suitably protected, and are reliably preserved, NSF’s five-year goal is twofold: To catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable; and To support development of a new generation of tools and services facilitating data mining, integration, analysis, and visualization essential to turning data into new knowledge and understanding. The resulting national digital data framework will consist of a range of data collections and managing organizations, networked together and designed to contribute to the emerging global information commons. It will be simultaneously local, regional, national and global in nature, and will evolve as science and engineering research and education needs change and as new opportunities arise.

The presentation will describe the progress towards open access to UK research papers over the past two years, covering subject and instituional repository growth and "gold" open access developments. The JISC has funded many projects to support universities in repository development, and some universities have made new policy commitments in support of open access. The Research Councils have also made important policy decisions, and the Wellcome Trust has joined with other biomedical funding agencies in establishing UK PubMed Central. Many UK publishers now offer an open access option to authors and UK universities and funding agencies are currently developing procedures to enable authors to take advantage of these options.