The Plan includes seven recommendations to improve research evaluation,[10] explicitly calling universities and research centres to adhere to principles of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012).[46] Amid them, one principle calls to reduce the weight of bibliometric indicators such as the journal impact factor and the candidate’s h -index) to include service to society (“third mission”) and contributions to advance open science.
Developed in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology held that year in San Francisco, the DORA declaration has become a worldwide initiative all scholarly disciplines signed so far (late 2022) by 19,531 individuals and 2636 organizations including research funders, universities, research institutes, professional societies, and scholarly publishers.

4. Outlook and Conclusions

The history of the uptake of open science practices in Italy in the first two decades of the 21th century has several lessons to teach to scholars based in other countries where the transition to “more open, rigorous and reproducible research”[26] is also taking place.
First, the case of Italy shows that the adoption of open science can be actually driven by a small group of pioneering scholars and researchers. In practice, an active minority comprised of Italy-based scholars and researchers active in both natural and social and humanistic science have actively engaged in open science, adopting its practices and disseminating its value. Examples span from chemistry[47] and law[48]through the earth[49] and life[50] sciences, and include virtually all disciplines.
Furthermore, the public discourse on open science in Italy has seen and continues to see important and creative contributions such as those of Caso,[48] Aliprandi,[23]Giglia,[24] Morriello,[51]Töttössy,[52] Gargiulo,[19]Galimberti,[10]Pievatoli,[53] and many others.
Second, the case of Italy where for many years no financial resources nor personal incentives were actually provided to practitioners of open science, shows that the uptake of open science can smoothly take place also in economically developing countries, where financial resources invested in research and education are a small fraction of those available in economically developed countries like Italy.
Third, the slow uptake of open science practices in Italy was also due to a prolonged lack of training to researchers potentially interested in the shift to opening their scholarship activity. Hence, universities and research policy makers interested in promoting the adoption of open science might wish to shape educators capable to effectively educate undergraduate students and researchers on the principles and tools of open science.
Fourth, also in Italy researchers owning personal academic websites were amid the first to use the World Wide Web to openly share the outcomes of their research and educational work with colleagues from across the world and with their students. In other words, the delay of Italy’s researchers to embrace the shift first to OA and then to open science has been partly due also to the limited use of the World Wide Web by Italy’s researchers to autonomously disseminate their research, educational and service to society activities.
As the practice of open science increases, to paraphrase Watson,[1] all publications will be freely and openly accessible, raw data and methods well described and reproducible, software released and peer reviews openly published and no longer anonymous. The objective of open access, indeed, is to maximize research impact by maximizing research access,[39] but the objective of open science is to enhance science credibility by improving all steps of the scientific research process including the final dissemination step. This, inter alia , requires to rediscover intellectual humility in which the limitations of any research work are explicitly presented by the authors and their consequences incorporated into the conclusions.[54]
Remarkably, the latter study including five important recommendations on how to practically increase humility in scientific articles,[54] is self-archived and openly accessible at the repository of the University of Groningen[55] (whereas single access to the article published in the paywalled journal in which it was published currently costs $32).
The present succinct analysis of the adoption of open science in Italy also shows evidence that, as it happens at the CNR where researchers rely on self-determination to outclass a shrinking research budget,[56] a small group of researchers and librarians self-determined to practice and disseminate research carried out according to the principles of open science, advocated its value for nearly two decades within a research community showing a prolonged lack of interest.
Eventually, by late 2022 Italian scholars and researchers may access increasingly numerous informative and educational resources on open science. Many universities and research centers have created open science offices. A national open science plan has been published, and an intense intellectual debate on open science is taking place in the specialized literature. Every year, furthermore, the aforementioned associations and “networks” organize in Italy conferences and meetings on open science no longer attended solely by open science advocates, but by researchers finally interested to learn how to adopt the principles of open science in their research activities.
Much remains to be done in Italy concerning the uptake of open science in education, especially undergraduate education, that goes much beyond open educational resources to include a new relationship between educational and research work,[57] and new evaluation of scholarship.[7]

Author Information

Rosaria Ciriminna - Istituto per lo Studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati, CNR, via U. La Malfa 153, 90146 Palermo, Italy; orcid.org/0000-0001-6596-1572; E-mail: rosaria.ciriminna@cnr.it
Mario Pagliaro - Istituto per lo Studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati, CNR, via U. La Malfa 153, 90146 Palermo, Italy; orcid.org/0000-0002-5096-329X; E-mail: mario.pagliaro@cnr.it

Conflict of interest

The Authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This study is dedicated to Subbiah Arunachalam for all he has done to promote and disseminate the principles and tools of open science in India.
Keywords: open science • Italy • open access • open scholarship • preprint • self-archiving