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The paper briefly describes the context and the origin of the Open Access (OA) movement whose main goal is to maximise the dissemination and the impact of publicly funded scholarly research results published in peer reviewed journals and more recently of underlying data collected or generated during a research. It continues with a short analysis of OA main features and benefits for the various stakeholders (researchers, academic and research centres, research funders, publishers, librarians, SME) followed by a description of the main barriers and obstacles that delay the OA process. It concludes presenting the necessary actions to its full implementation.

The Open Access Tracker is an online tool that helps document the growth of open access in six Mediterranean Countries, Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal (http://www.medoanet.eu/browse). It has been developed within the project MedOANet (www.medoanet.eu), a two-year project funded under the Science in Society Programme of the EC FP7. The OA Tracker provides a real time overview of the state of the art and contributes to evidence-based advocacy and policy-making. The OA Tracker brings together information on journals, repositories, institutional policies, funder’s policies and publishers’ self-archiving policies, representing Open Access activities in the six countries based on the information and data registered in the selected authoritative International sources. The OA Tracker as an interoperable tool, also allows updated information to be exported to international authoritative sources, and likely to be expanded to other kind of resources. The Tracker aims at encouraging the stakeholder community to register its open access resources with these established services, in order to increase the accuracy of information regarding the state of open access in the six countries. Such a tool could be adopted in another geographic areas to advocate OA venues and policies.

This presentation focuses on the competencies needed by electronic resource librarians.

PLEIADI, the portal and national OAI-PMH service provider for Italian scholarly literature maintained by CASPUR e CILEA, has been completely reingenereed, using Drupal and VuFind.

This presentation briefly describes some of the latest developments on Open Access in Europe. Selected activities and implementations from some European countries are reported as an example of the achievements in Europe. The presentation is not exhaustive, it only refers to some of the trends with reference to automatic multidepositing, implementation of national platforms to give visibility to OA research output, to local initiatives to implement Sherpa-Romeo with reference to local publishers. It ends with references to Eu funded projects devoted to OA and brief description of the recent EU funded initiative OpenAIRE.

The CARE Library Committee, within the Library Commission of the Conference of Italian Rectors, has been the promoter of an initiative aimed to explore the issues related to the presence of e-books in academic libraries. This document presents the state of the art of organizational and management decisions in academic libraries and library systems, and suggests future scenarios of e-books acquisition and use.

Net users use hugely Web 2.0 tools and mobile communication devices to discover information resources. Discovery happens everywhere, but on library portals. Librarians should realize that the needs of the new generations (Net Gen) are fast changing and should reconfigure library services and collections in order to accomplish these needs. They should learn how to position their libraries in the flow: leisureflow, researchflow, learnflow.

The PLEIADI initiative (acronym for “Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali”, Portal for Italian scholarly e-literature in open archives and institutional repositories http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/) originates from the collaboration between two major Italian university consortia, CASPUR and CILEA, within the framework of the AEPIC project. PLEIADI provides a national platform that offers centralized access to the scholarly literature archived in Italian repositories. The main features of the initiative are: discovery and locate, personalized services, visibility and impact, awareness and dissemination. PLEIADI aims at allowing the academic and research community to discover, to access Italian OA scholarly production in a structured way, at increasing its visibility and its impact on the Italian and the International academic and research world. Furthermore PLEIADI provides the end-user with a personalized environment offering several services of high interest to the researcher and to his/her work, and it aims at keeping the end-users abreast with what is going in the OA realm and contributing to his/her awareness and support of OA. The personalized services include users profile creation, alerting services, search and citations savings, personalized news services (news, forum, RSS). The main features of the initiative are: discovery and locate, personalized services, visibility and impact, awareness and dissemination. PLEIADI aims at allowing the academic and research community to discover, to access Italian OA scholarly production in a structured way, at increasing its visibility and its impact on the Italian and the International academic and research world. Furthermore PLEIADI provides the end-user with a personalized environment offering several services of high interest to the researcher and to his/her work, and it aims at keeping the end-users abreast with what is going in the OA realm and contributing to his/her awareness and support of OA. The personalized services include users profile creation, alerting services, search and citations savings, personalized news services (news, forum, RSS).

The OA movement in Italy enjoys the active participation of single universities, research centres and supercomputing consortia. An overview of OA initiatives in Italy is followed by a more detailed presentation of PLEIADI- Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives, the Italian national platform to provide central access to digital content deposited in Italian Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi).The presentation will conclude with some considerations on the future prospects of OA in Italy.

The presentation covers a brief summary of the state of the art of OA in Italy and abroad with reference to the two OA strategies: self-archiving and Open Access journals. Some critical issues related to istitutional repositories are also covered as well a presentation of the Italian service provider PLEIADI and its functionalities. The paper ends with a call to Italian librarians to get involved in supporting OA in their institutions.

The PLEIADI Project (acronym for “Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali”, a portal for Italian scholarly e-literature in open archives and institutional repositories) originated from the collaboration between two major Italian university consortia, CASPUR and CILEA, within the framework of the AEPIC project. PLEIADI aims at building a national platform that offers centralized access to the scholarly literature archived in Italian repositories.

The PLEIADI Project (acronym for “Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali”, a portal for Italian scholarly e-literature in open archives and institutional repositories) was born within the framework of a collaboration between two major Italian university consortia, CASPUR and CILEA, as part of a project called AEPIC (http://www.aepic.it). PLEIADI’s goal is to promote national awareness in the Open Access scenario and provide centralized access for scholarly literature archived in Italian institutional repositories (or “data providers” in the OAI - Open Archives Initiative architecture). PLEIADI also aims at providing end users (mainly the academic and research community) with a personalized environment, user profiling, an area to save searches and articles, e-mail alerts. The portal enhances users’ awareness on Open Access issues through several information services (news, RSS, forum), and promotes self-archiving of scholarly articles in institutional repositories. The service, available at the URL http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/, was launched in November 2004, during a national event held in Messina, which marked the “official starting point” for the Open Access movement in the Italian academic community.

An overview of open access initiatives in Italy: Messina workshop, E-LIS, Pleiadi portal, institutional repositories. Speech made at the conference session 'Reports from delegates on implementing the Berlin Declaration in their organisations'.

CASPUR and CILEA support Open Access through various channels: Berlin Declaration and SPARC, implementation services for institutional repositories, AEPIC project for electronic publishing, PLEIADI portal to provide a central search facility for Italian repositories.

Content management is the creation/management of contents in a complex website, through the definition and elaboration of a publishing project, the planning of a series of activities and the development of contents, published with different outputs. CMS can be applied to library portals, digital objects and knowledge management. However more professional skills are required and CMS systems result immature.

The goal of this study is to measure the changes in scholarly journals usage in the Italian academic context. In order to meet our goals a survey was conducted based on a on-line questionnaire (1,305 respondents). The final results of this study clearly show the existence of four different categories of users (midway innovators, midway traditionalists, full innovators and full traditionalists), each category represents a different approach to digital library service.

Presentation of SPARC at the conference the Conference “Scientific communication and electronic publishing”. The user-author in the circle scientific communication-electronic publishing and research evaluation.

This paper investigates about: - usage statistics - future developments - CIBER consortium - E-joural library service

This presentation analyzes the context elements that characterize Italian digital libraries experiences, the international framework, technological-staff-competencies infrastructures, and major international non proprietary standards. Then it lists the possible content, access policies and the main cost categories.

This report includes a brief description of Scholarly Academic Research Coalition (SPARC) scopes and aims, a detailed description of the activities and initiatives being managed by SPARC-USA and in particular by SPARC-Europe (the European section), and finally some observations about Open Access journals. SPARC is concerned with supporting change in the world of scholarly communication and publishing through the experimentation of new models in information communication and diffusion; therefore, it contributes in developing competencies in this field, in reducing start-up risks, in assisting all those (universities, libraries, professional societies, responsible publishers) who are interested in launching digital libraries initiatives matching the objectives and values of scholarly communication. SPARC-Europe activities run on different levels: making the protagonists of scholarly communication and publishing sensitive about the necessity of contributing in creating a new environment fostering the growth of electronic scholarly information that is freely accessible or cheap; promoting institutional archives and initiatives about open access; supporting the application and use of new technologies in the field of scholarly communication; assisting in designing and implementing innovative publishing initiatives based on new sustainable economic models.