Open Access to Scientific Articles: Comparing Italian with German law | Kluwer Copyright Blog

"The Italian Parliament recently approved a new law concerning the valorization of culture (Law of October 7, 2013, n. 112, G.U. n. 236, 8.10.2013). The law includes, in section 4, a regulation for Open Access (OA) to scientific publications. With this new law, the Italian parliament aims to align Italy’s national law with the European Open Access policies that are clearly expressed in the EU Commission’s Recommendation of 17 July 2012 on 'Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information' and the Communication 'Towards better access to scientific information: Boosting the benefits of public investments in research'. Looking specifically at the contents of the new Italian law, one sees that several obligations are imposed on public bodies providing or managing the funding of scientific research, such as research institutions and universities: The subjects mentioned shall take the necessary measures for the implementation of OA with regard to ‘articles’ published in periodical collections (at least biannual), which are based on publicly funded research. (The Law speaks literally of 'article' which is technically a literary genre. Most likely the legislator wants to include the entire genre, excluding books). OA publication shall regard works that are publicly financed (at least 50%).The Italian legislator has chosen to pursue, indifferently, both the OA models: the golden and green road; the two most common routes with regard to OA. On the golden OA road, authors publish their articles in OA journals that provide free and immediate OA to all articles. Authors that choose the green OA road, publish in 'traditional' journals and, upon acceptance for publication, to make their peer-reviewed final draft freely accessible online by self-archiving or by depositing the article in an institutional or disciplinary repository. Following the green road, the work must to be stored in OA archives, no later than 18 months from the first publication for scientific, technical and medical disciplines, and no later than 24 months for humanities and social sciences ..."