What happened? One year ago, the Italian Ministry of Culture published some guidelines that imposed heavy payments, even for scientific publications derived from publicly funded (e.g. by the European Union) research, in case of (re)use of images of state-owned cultural heritage objects (CHOs). These guidelines were contrary to the indication of the European Union on the digitisation of cultural heritage, which pushed for years to implement measures to guarantee the broadest possible openness and compliance with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles of digitised CHOs (DCHOs) that are in the public domain for any purpose – the motto here is: what is in the public domain stays in the public domain. Thus, a few weeks ago and after several months of objections, the Italian Ministry of Culture revised its guidelines to relax the conditions for applying such heavy payments in case of scientific publications. However, we are far from the goal, considering that there are still massive restrictions, regulated by law, on the application of open access licenses (e.g. the Creative Commons CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) to these DCHOs, which is a mandatory requirement in several funding programmes, including Horizon Europe.
What I did. As the corresponding author, I’ve finalised the bureaucracy with the publisher for an open-access publication of a work co-authored with Andras, Clement, Emanuele, Fajar, Ivan, and Oscar, just published in Scientific Data. The article, entitled A maturity model for catalogues of semantic artefacts, is entirely focused on the key components that enable the implementation of semantic interoperability, i.e. semantic artefacts, that are a machine-actionable formalisation of a conceptualisation enabling sharing and reuse by humans and machines. In particular, we reflected on the catalogues where semantic artefacts are stored – i.e. web-based systems that foster the availability, discoverability and long-term preservation and maintenance of semantic artefacts – and provided a set of twelve dimensions for measuring the maturity of such catalogues.
What to read. Since its introduction, in the last lecture of my course on Open Science within the second-cycle degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, I invite an expert to talk about the current status of Open Science in Europe. This year, continuing with the tradition of the previous course editions, I had the pleasure of having a friend of mine, Elena Giglia, who gave a presentation entitled Open Science: in dialogue with society. My reading suggestion for this week is the slides of her talk that have been deposited on Zenodo:
Giglia, E. (2024, May 7). Open Science: In dialogue with society. Open Science course, a.a. 2023/2024, Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11127310