Future developments All institutions agreed to the proposal of sharing their publications in DSpace ISS by establishing communities and collections of their own documents; some of them (IRE and CRO) already joined the ISS digital archive. The situation is in progress. While this article is going to press, the Istituto Regina Elena decided to adopt RefWorks for its own institutional archive, in order to

set up a good collection of standard metadata and achieve a better organization of the archive. Discussion Thanks to the existing www.selleckchem.com/products/sn-38.html online platforms, institutional policies mandating self-archiving in institutional repositories are definitely needed, mainly for papers describing research activity financed by public funds. This represents an ineluctable process as underlined learn more by Stevan Harnad [32], one of the gurus of the open access movement: “”The freeing of their present

and future refereed research from all access- and impact-barriers forever is now entirely in the hands of researchers. Posterity is looking over our shoulders, and will not judge us flatteringly if we continue to delay the optimal and inevitable needlessly, now that it is clearly within our reach”". Besides making the whole scientific Italian legacy available for all, this tendency would permit a “”multidimensional evaluation”" of the research activity, not limited, as it currently happens, to considering impact factor journals, but extended to all research products from monographs to patents to research projects. Some studies SC79 ic50 show evidence that open access journal articles are cited more and quicker

and are downloaded more often [1, 33]. Besides the advantage of an increasing citation rate, other criteria to be considered for an objective evaluation of research papers are the number of the article downloads and the received comments to an article. The scientific production in terms of published items could be linked to the authors’ institutions and to their curricula. This would consent to give major visibility to specialties and professional PDK4 qualities of the individual scientists, thus spreading awareness on the human and financial resources to be invested in the innovative branches of research and in new collaborations, avoiding the duplication of efforts and the reiteration of research studies. Conclusion The digital archive set up by the ISS, DSpace ISS, represents a real opportunity to make Italian research output in the field of public health freely accessible online, beyond the traditional “”colonial”" dependence from foreign indexing services and databases. DSpace ISS relies on a steady structure of metadata including also Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) adopted by PubMed for subject indexing.