The Open Science Committee promotes the dissemination of the Guidelines for the Editorial Activity and the Scientific Publications Office of the University of Trento, a document that illustrates to the academic community the organization of the editorial activity, the editorial policies, and the duties of the Scientific Publications Office of the University.
The Scientific Publications Office, established in 2021 with the aim of coordinating the editorial services, supports the editorial initiatives, verifying their quality, facilitating indexing in the main bibliographic and bibliometric databases, and promoting the sharing of editorial policies and standard operating procedures, particularly in the area of copyright management.
The Guidelines depict the current organization of the University’s editorial activity, which is structured as follows:
- The Rector is the owner and legal representative of the University’s editorial activity.
- The Structures (Departments, Centres, Administrative Directorates) decide on the start of new editorial initiatives and guarantee their content and formal quality, as well as their economic sustainability.
- Directors, Editor-in-Chiefs, Scientific Committees, and Editorial Teams of the initiatives have decision-making power within their respective areas of responsibility.
- The Scientific Publications Office supports and coordinates the University’s editorial activity from a technical-administrative point of view.
Furthermore, the Guidelines define UniTrento’s editorial policies by establishing that:
- The types of works eligible for publication are journals, book series, and single books that have scientific relevance, high didactic value, or pertain to the “third mission”.
- The persons eligible for publication are autonomously established by each editorial initiative.
- The proposer of a new editorial initiative shall be affiliated with the University.
- Works are published as open-access digital editions (TESeO, IRIS) and in some cases also as print editions.
- The recommended license is CC BY-SA, and the copyright remains with the authors of the texts.
- The scientific, ethical, and legal responsibility remains with the editorial initiatives.
- Publication costs are borne by the initiative itself and/or its Structure.
- Agreements with external parties are handled by the reference Structure.
- Support and consultancy from the Scientific Publications Office are reserved only for the types of works eligible for publication.
Finally, the Guidelines describe the duties of the Scientific Publications Office, which can be summarized as follows:
- Coordination of the editorial initiatives (forms, templates, information, support);
- Support for the start of new editorial initiatives;
- Management of access to the open-access publishing platforms;
- Publication of works (assessing their formal quality and the requirements for publication);
- Support for the indexing in databases and for requests for journal classification;
- Relations with other academic publishers;
- Participation in the work of the Open Science Committee;
- Administrative activities, such as the purchase and assignment of bibliographic identification codes, legal deposit, the registration of journals with the Italian Register of Communication Operators, monitoring and statistics on the editorial activity.