The Open Access Movement

The Open Access movement is promoted by lots of universities, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, and other well-established organization etc. which encourage their researchers/grant recipients to publish their works in open archives to grant not only a free, worldwide, right of access to, but also a license to copy, print, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly with respect to the existing legal copyright framework.

Contents

The registered doctoral theses are those from the Milan, Piacenza and Brescia campuses as from academic year 2005/2006: all metadata of them are visible (title, author, editor, advisor, Italian and English abstracts, issue date, identifier for citations and links etc.), and the relevant full texts are available according to the consent given by each author.

In accordance with international standards, doctoral theses are registered in an IT platform built according to the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), which allows interoperability and enables information exchange not only among different open access repositories, but also among repositories and general and / or speciality search engines (like Google Scholar, Scientific commons, etc.). This gives the opportunity to be part of an international research network.

Guidelines

The contents are prepared taking into consideration the guidelines published (in Italian) by "CRUI (Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities) open access workgroup" in November 2007. These guidelines aim at providing a national standard for theses repositories so as to interact with current European projects, such as OpenAire Explore.

Norms of use

Consultation of doctoral theses is possible in compliance with current copyright and intellectual property laws.
The use of the contents is possible for private, research or teaching use, keeping unaltered all information regarding the authorship of the work and the ownership of the copyright, reporting in full the author's name and surname, the title of the thesis, the thesis supervisor and co-rapporteur, the university, the academic year and the number of pages cited, if any.
Use for commercial purposes remains prohibited.
Università Cattolica is not responsible for errors or inaccuracies in the contents of the theses in electronic format, as well as for the consequences of using the information contained therein.

A few words on copyright

Works published on the Internet are protected under copyright laws just like those in paper format. Technology has only enabled a new means of publishing and therefore of access.

Italian copyright law (in Italian):

• Legge 22 aprile 1941, No. 633 and further modifications and/or integrations (from the Altalex website)

Hints for Ph.D. students (in Italian):

• Tesi di dottorato e diritto d'autore - Indicazioni per l'applicazione delle linee guida per l'accesso aperto alle tesi di dottorato (from the CRUI website)

Other resources on open access publishing and copyright:

• if the thesis will be published in part or in full by a publisher, it is advisable to inquire about the copyright policy adopted by the publisher. In fact, the author holds all moral and economic rights to his or her own work, as long as these rights are not assigned to a publisher for the purpose of publishing a work. However, with some publishers it is possible to assign only part of these rights and reserve e.g. the right to publish in an institutional repository (such as IRISPubliCatt). One of the sites that records publishers' copyright policies is SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access)
• Creative commons international