CRUI and Open Access in Italy

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, on the function that open archives may have in the research assessment procedures, on the best practices for the creation of open access journals.