The dissemination of knowledge is a laudable objective, and it is our mission to facilitate this process. We believe that the traditional modes of publishing are not incompatible with this objective if our intention is to reach non-academic audiences as well.
Although it may seem paradoxical, simply making knowledge freely available on a platform is not enough to generate impactful content circulation. While access costs and technicalities of file or metadata availability are important, they are not the primary concern. Instead, the focus should be on encouraging effective interactions between content creators (authors) and user communities, particularly practitioners and professionals. This is a cognitive issue: the gap between the cultural codes of content creators and users must be closed. To address this, it is crucial to involve a variety of experts, each bringing their own specialized knowledge. While the authors create the content, a third-party expert can help avoid self-referentiality and gather input from the broader user community.
Our goal is to ensure that our authors gain national and international visibility, both directly and through collaboration with our partners.
Since 2023, the FrancoAngeli, FrancoAngeli Journals and FrancoAngeli Series websites have been fully searchable in dual languages (Italian and English). To date, 15% of accesses originate from abroad (European countries and the United States of America in the first instance). Since 2006, we have been early partners of the Torrossa platform, distributing digital content to Italian and foreign academic institutions. We interface regularly with all major international bibliographic databases. We provide these professional skills to our authors and the wider community, ensuring the most effective discoverability of the works we publish.
Open Access
In recent years, interest in Open Access publishing - free access without barriers - has notably increased within the scientific community. This surge is driven by the Web s potential to share digital content and data more widely. In this context, since the initial steps outlined in the Budapest (2002) and Berlin (2003) Declarations, the scientific community, as well as institutions, has been moving in a strategic and accelerated manner. For the European Union, Open Science has been a key goal since 2016 (European Science Cloud); UNESCO in 2021 adopted a Recommendation; and the Ministry of Research (Mur) itself defined a National Plan for Open Science (PNSA) in 2022.
Given this momentum, we believe it is crucial to offer our Authors the option to publish in Open Access alongside traditional academic publishing, which remains indispensable for the dissemination and study of research, both in Green mode (i.e., the author can upload a digital copy of his or her work to his or her institutional repository after an embargo period) and in Gold mode (i.e., open access from the moment the work is published), to accommodate the different needs in an increasingly dynamic but at the same time complex reality.
Read more: Open Access, the FrancoAngeli solution