Open book: a librarian’s view g


Sustainable development goals (SDGs), defined by the UN as ‘a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future’, are strongly related to the academic world, as an important commitment of the universities towards society for the achievement of all goals through research, education and third mission. In Italy, in order to promote and spread the culture of sustainability, the Conference of Rectors of Italian University (CRUI https://www.crui.it/crui-english.html) created in 2015 a network of universities for sustainable development, RUS https:// sites.google.com/unive.it/rus/home). RUS is working on mapping the state of the art (for example, mapping publications and research outputs upon SDGs), promoting instruction, and planning actions to support Agenda 2030. Some universities are also involved in the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development, ASviS, (http://asvis.it/asvis-italian-alliance-for- sustainable-development), an association that includes different kinds of public institutions, foundations and associations. Among them is the Italian Library Association, which is working on the topics via a study group, of which I am a member (https://www.aib.it/struttura/commissioni-e- gruppi/gruppo-asvis/), to set indicators for culture and libraries and to spread Agenda 2030 principles in all libraries. Finally, another hot topic for academic


librarians supporting research in Italy is, of course, open science. After the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Berlin Declaration, in 2004, most Italian universities signed the Messina Declaration on Open Access. In the same year, a couple of university consortia (now merged into Cineca) launched the portal PLEIADI (Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives http://find. openarchives.it/). In 2006, the Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities (CRUI) established a Working Group on open access (OA) as part of the CRUI Library Committee, which released guidelines. Some non-profit organisations are also working, at national level, on OA, such as AISA (Associazione Italiana per la promozione della Scienza Aperta – Italian Association for the promotion of Open Science http://aisa. sp.unipi.it/about-aisa/) and IOSSG (Italian Open Science Support Group - https:// sites.google.com/view/iossg/home), and the Italian Library Association has a study group on OA (https://www.aib.it/struttura/ commissioni-e-gruppi/gruppo-studio- open-access-pubblico dominio/). Despite many initiatives to support and implement OA practices, there is still a lot of


12 Research Information June/July 2019 @researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


The Castle of Valentino, home to the architecture faculty at Polytechnic University of Turin


“There is no way to face the many challenges without a collaboration between all components of academic institutions”


work to do to spread the awareness of OA culture. Most obstacles to spreading OA are due to the national research assessment lead by Anvur, which does not consider OA as a good practice to reward at all. Being strongly based on bibliometrics, the Italian evaluation system does not promote OA practices, so researchers are not encouraged to publish in OA. Consequently, often they have not enough knowledge of this opportunity and have many prejudices about publishing in OA, especially because some consider the quality of OA journals to be lower, and fear copyright infringement. A strong advocacy campaign is then


essential in universities and academic librarians are the most involved professionals in this task. Many universities have released their policy for OA (the list here http://wikimedia.sp.unipi.it/index. php/OA_Italia/Regolamenti_e_Policy_ sull%27Open_Access - including my institution, which released it on 1 June) but often this did not create significant change. With a lot of effort and advocacy by librarians, policy makers try to foster in researchers the habit to store papers (either in post-print or pre-print version) in the institutional repositories and, in the short-term, achieve green OA, while working to attain gold OA in the long-term.


A further theme, which is gradually


becoming a central issue in universities, and partly involving librarians, is open data and data management. Few universities in Italy have a policy for open data, but a couple have a specific policy and are working intensively with data, such as the University of Milan (https://www.unimi.it/it/ateneo/ normative/policy/policy-sulla-gestione-dei- dati-della-ricerca-rdm) and the University of Padua (https://bibliotecadigitale.cab.unipd. it/bd/per_chi_pubblica/rdm). For sure, inputs coming from the


European Commission and related to European programmes such as Horizon 2020 and the future innovation framework programme Horizon Europe will help to spread the awareness and practices of OA and open data that will become more and more relevant in academic research. Therefore, the near-future scenario for


academic librarians will be a greater and greater involvement in all of the research life cycle, from data collection to the final outputs. This means, for librarians, the necessity to keep pace with fast change, through continuous updating and training, and the need for an intense collaboration between librarians and faculty staff, as well as strict a collaboration with other services of the university, such as areas involved in supporting research and evaluation. The complexity of academia is increasing and there is no way to face the many challenges without a collaboration of all components of academic institutions.


Rossana Morriello is a research support librarian at Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy


Do Rossana’s experiences chime with you? Would you like to share your thoughts as a librarian with the readers of Research Information? Email tim.gillett@europascience.com


Olena Kosynska/Shutterstock.com


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