13th Conference on Professional Information Resources

Autor: Elisabetta Poltronieri, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy

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Fulltext

Abstract:

This paper aims at presenting the efforts to improve the visibility of full-text scientific literature produced in Italy in the field of public health and related areas. It particularly focuses on the features of two digital archives established and maintained by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, Italian National Institute of Health), the leading centre for biomedical research in Italy: a) the institutional repository, OAI compliant, of scientific works produced by ISS research staff; b) the database of the Italian translations of publications issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and collected by the ISS as WHO Documentation Centre. With reference to the potentialities of both these online archives, the authors discuss the issues of free access to full-text documents and the compatibility with copyright themes. Moreover, a special attention is devoted to the benefits of Open Access (OA) publishing model either in OA repositories or in OA journals. As a result, a standardized form has been developed to be used in order to ask the publisher’s permission to place full-text publications in the mentioned archives. This action might contribute to favour the agreements between authors and publishers and to enhance the trust required between them. The free access to full-text documents still implies crucial issues. Nevertheless, the policies of making digital contents available on the Net are gaining increasing success. New tools - aimed at maximizing the help to authors and minimizing the effort from individual staff - are therefore strongly recommended in order to support the provision of open online access to research material.

About author:

Elisabetta Poltronieri Started her career as an indexing librarian in 1990, at the library of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian Institute of Health). Her present position is researcher, and is currently working in the Publishing Unit of the Institute. Her main responsibilities include bibliographic editing and the diffusion of scientific work published by the Institute’s researchers. She has been currently appointed to head a project aimed at establishing an institutional repository that is conceptually based on the principles of Open Access.

Author: Helena Bouzková, National Medical Library, Czech Republic

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Author: Livia Vasas, Central Library of Semmelweis University, Hungary

Co-authors:

Author: Margot Gerharter, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research GmbH &Co KG, Austria

Author: Hugh Blackbourn, Nature Publishing Group, United Kingdom

Author: Milan Špála, Charles University - 1st Medical Faculty, Czech Republic