GLAM/Newsletter/June 2024/Contents/Italy report
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Open science conference and Wikimedians in Sicily
Open Access in Scientific Research
The conference "Authors' Rights and Open Access in Scientific Research" was held in Rome and online on Monday, June 17. The event aimed to present the "Right2Pub – Balancing Publication Rights" project and its achieved results.
Open science, publication standards, and the sharing of scientific research data and results are increasingly relevant topics, raising important questions about the relationship between the free sharing of knowledge and copyright. As the organizers explained:
"Awareness and proper management of authors' rights are crucial for the progress of research and the protection of the interests of the scientific community. There is a clear need to promote regulatory changes at the national level to recognize and support the right of secondary publication in the scientific field (secondary publication right) and the retention of rights by the author."
The conference was organized by the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems of the National Research Council (CNR) with the "Dario Nobili" Library of the CNR Research Area in Bologna, the Library and Scientific Documentation Center of the CNR Research Area in Pisa, the Italian Chapter of Creative Commons, and the National Coordination of Knowledge Rights 21.
Wikimedians in Sicily
June was hot in Sicily, and not just because of the temperatures! During this month, several events took place on the island to bring together users of Wikimedia projects and other collaborative projects, in Catania and Palermo. Following the Wiki Takes Catania event organized in September 2023 and the hackathon in April 2024, Sicilian Wikimedians are determined to develop projects in the region after a few years of inactivity and to collaborate with like-minded groups already present in the area.
We started in Palermo with a meeting that brought together Wikimedians, members of the free software promotion association in Palermo, Free Circle, and OpenStreetMap (OSM) users. We began with a series of presentations: how Wikipedia and other projects work, collaborative mapping with OSM, the Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments contribution campaigns, and the StreetComplete app to easily add useful information to OSM. This was followed by very interesting discussions on the concept of civic hacking, the idea of grassroots efforts to improve public information and services, and how to engage the public with open-licensed tools.
This meeting was also an opportunity to discover the social coworking space neu[nòi], which hosted the event and regularly organizes educational meetings. Manfredi, a Palermo native passionate about open source, told us after the event: "It was a breath of fresh open source air, which really rekindles the desire to push forward many projects."
A few days later, the second Wikidata workshop was held at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Catania, conducted together with Sannita. The first session in April was an opportunity to present an overview of how the project works and how Wikidata's data is organized. This time, we went deeper with the participants, students and others, who created accounts and made their first edits on Wikidata.
Although the workshop was held at the invitation of a computer science professor, we demonstrated that Wikidata is not just a technical project for developers. In fact, Giuseppe, a literature student dedicating his thesis to Cesare Pavese's novel "The Moon and the Bonfires," discovered Wikidata on this occasion. Together, we discussed how to describe the relationship between a fictional character and a real person on Wikidata.
"Wikidata was a revelation: knowing that others before me had contributed to modelling the relationships between characters and places, between fiction and reality, gave me a foundation to start my work and encouraged me to contribute my knowledge to expand this domain of knowledge," Giuseppe enthusiastically told us.
These meetings are very important for activating the community in a place because, thanks to precise communication about Wikimedia projects (meeting pages, the list of users in a specific region), we were able to reach people who have been participating in the projects for a long time but had never attended an in-person event. As one of these users told us: "I discovered a whole new world, I am very happy to have met you!"
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