Abstract

At the time of the Budapest Manifesto, self-archiving supporters looked like a revolutionary, "anti-commercial publishers" movement. Today, after some years debate (and technological innovation in research and scientific e-publishing), antagonist positions are able to compromise and consider the tradeoffs. What is really changing in the Authors' attitude towards institutional or disciplinary repositories, and peer reviewed open access journals? Many recent papers have investigated these topics. From these sources we can note that Biomedical Authors behave differently from Physicists, Astronomers and Mathematicians, who have been using open archives for such a long time. Therefore we intend to analyze these different trends in the diverse communities. Several aspects also deserve a careful attention: the role of new OA journals in evaluation processes (i.e. their impact and citations), implementation and maintenance costs of institutional repositories, the evolution of bibliometric indicators. We intend also to discuss the role of libraries in service innovation and e-publishing promotion. The main areas where a key role may be played are: institutional repository management and users' training, the promotion of OA journals and information about evaluation methods (both qualitative and quantitative). We think that the transition towards new communication models may be a great opportunity that libraries have to be ready to support.