Biblioteche accademiche, comunicazione scientifica e valutazione della ricerca: nuovi ruoli e sfide per i bibliotecari delle università

In recent years, several factors have been affecting the range of competencies which academic librarians should be able to offer in support of the composite mission of universities (research, education, third mission). The season of the integration and refinement of new generation tools for remote reference services and digital collection management in research libraries is not complete yet. Such process, however, has already set the stage for new roles and challenges for university librarians, in relation to what we would like to regard as “the ecosystem of scientific communication and research evaluation”. Actually, this happens in a scenario where the major international publishers are moving more quickly, and often more effectively for their business, than public institutions in implementing their own policies. The landscape appears quite mutable also because of the many initiatives for digital sharing of academic research, which, despite their markedly commercial features, are gaining easy success among scholars. As a result, on the one hand, the Open Access movement still struggles to fulfil the desired revolution in the practices of scientific communication: OA initiatives seem far from achieving the objective of full researchers’ independence from financial constraints in the exposure of their research outputs. On the other hand, the assessment procedures for measuring scientific research run by national agencies are increasingly dependent on the choices adopted by the main producers of citation databases. What are the possible ways out? Can the role of academic librarians be relevant? Some workable paths are suggested here. The first is to develop a service of customized advice to university’s authors, with an aim at helping them to optimize the qualitative and citation impact of their products beyond the publishing oligopolies. The second is to support the university’s governance in the creation of effective strategies and tools for OA, and the university press before all. The third relates to the technical maintenance of the institutional repositories, also by directly contributing to the improvement of the quality of information present in international citation databases.