1.
I’m going to speak about an on line publishing initative I started in 1999 with some colleagues of other Italian universities (proff. Pietro Corrao, Roberto Delle Donne, Stefano Gasparri and Gian Maria Varanini). I think that this experiment can be characterized as home-made: with all the advantages and all the disadvantages that this dimension involves.

Just for this, my participation to this round table will perhaps contribute to clarify the point of view of scholars who intend to employ new technologies of communication in order to bypass the organizational and economical barriers that condition the traditional press channels of communication of historical knowledge, and in order to favor a more wide distribution of personal publications.

The quest for innovative alternatives disclosed by digital press, raises in fact new problems for scholars who decide to get personally engaged in the preparation and in the editing of the new means of publication.

2.
First of all, I will illustrate – in a general way – our publication and the results we have obtained till now, in order to offer an idea of the contents and the shapes in which it is articulated.

Infact Reti Medievali [RM]is a set of web pages that analyse and promote the use of computer techniques in the study of medieval history. The editors are teachers and scholars from the five participating universities.

The RM project plans to be highly informative by offering texts, working tools and analyses of historiography, along the lines of present-day European and Italian research and teaching practices. We also operate a selection of materials and texts submitted by the peer-reviewing.

This project aims to create an on-line community of medieval scholars of unrestricted specializations, and to encourage institutions and individual scholars to experiment with the potential offered by new communication technologies.

RM is gradually developping integrated projects: it is an electronic journal, a resource archive, a digital library, an information bullettin, a place for multi-media and cyber-space teaching experiments, a historical archive.

The project is divided into six main sections: RM Journal, RM Repertory, RM Library, RM Calendar, RM Didactic, RM Memory.

RM Journal contains debates, hyper-text essays and multi-media experiments, reviews, working-paper proposals, up-to-date bibliographies and web-site information.

RM Repertory is a structured and critical overview of the basic resources for a broad spectrum of Medieval Studies. It will present new material as it becomes available on-line.

RM Library publishes on-line texts concerning fields and problems of current medieval research, becoming the first specialized library of this kind.

RM Calendar supplies information on international meetings, seminars, congresses and historical or archaeological exhibitions in the field of Medieval Studies.

RM Didactics presents teaching materials and experiences connected to the use of on-line multi-media technologies.

RM Memory is a sort of dictionary of scholars, of past and present works, as well as of important current problems in historiography.

A section called RM News highlights the new input of the different sections, so as to simplify consulting the site. We also send by e-mail a monthly newsletter of updating materials to a large Italian and international address book.

We also offer an english version of home and introductory pages of every sections. RM is multilingual: texts are written in the authors’ original languages (Italian, obviously, but also French, German, Spanish and English).

Every section, every page is totally free access and full-text.

RM was started by a group of scholars who feel uneasy with the current fragmentation of historiography and research. Though it could be looked at as source of growth, this fragmentation may cause an increasing lack of communication among the various medievalist sectors, as well as between them and other fields of historical research.

The promoters recognize the need for a critical re-evaluation of traditional research and the objectives of current activities. RM hopes to intervene in the areas where the most interesting developments have occurred in Italian and international medieval studies of the last decades.

RM’s challenge is to experiment fully with the potential of all new telematic and cybernetic communication systems, mostly unexplored as a community initiative. The promoters want to change the general opinion about the low scientific value of current electronic publications, encouraging an active involvement in the now undeniably global transformation of research practices and language.

We believe it worth while, therefore, to pursue this service, to offer a meeting place open to all and a site for the development of new methods of communication among Italian and international medievalists.

In effect, we are receiving growing scientific acknowledgments from more interlocutors in Italy and several European countries.

The statistics of contacts to RM are encouraging. In the first year of publication we have registered approximately 100,000 contacts, with a monthly average at the eve of 2001 of approximately 12,500 opened pages, which indicates a trend of approximately 150,000 contacts for the current year.

Readers are obviously mainly Italian, but with meaningful quotas of readers from German linguistic area, from France, from Spain, from Latin America. Maybe, the multilingual prospect is rather penalizing if one considers that the majority of english speaking readers are mainly monolingual: in fact, we register rather few readers from England and from USA.

The analysis of data, moreover reveals an interest that characterizes RM as a working set of web sites (contacts happen mostly in the working days, with a drop in the summer and in vacation time), with a public articulated in a nucleus of specialists (teachers, researchers, ph-doctors and students) and in a galaxy of readers not specialist, but amateurs of the Middle Ages (a category of readers that we consider important for our initiative).

3.
Our initiative is also physically dislocated on more servers: currently on those of the history departments and the letter faculties of the universities of Florence, Naples, Trento and Venice, and, in a next future, also in Palermo’s.

We aim at a better distribution of the editorial job and at giving a reticular dimention to the initiative. For the input of data and documents, each server is assisted by young editors who add to their proficiency in medieval history the competence in computer science required to carry out the job of digital editing.

It’s evident – first of all to us, editors of RM – that our publishing initiative, the way it is at present organised, has homemade characteristics. As I said, this has doubtless advantages: control of every phase of the work, lack of any publishing mediation, control of the costs, prompt updating, and so on.

Nevertheless, initiatives like ours – born spontaneously in groups of researchers and in scholar communities – have to face in the near future many important problems.

Among which I indicate four, at least.

First of all is the necessity to choose: whether to maintain the direct control of every publishing phase (a possibility that a medium as Internet offers like no other up to now), or to delegate the technical aspects to one specialized publishing staff?

When we have put RM on line, Firenze University Press not yet existed. It is evident that we shall have to find some sort of collaboration with the latter, because its staff will be able to supply a very important technical and editorial support. But, I ask myself if, as an example, the eventual adoption of the publishing FUP logo can’t in a certain measure condition the reticular pluralism of our initiative, seeing that it was conceived as a collaboration between more athenaeums and also that it’s strategically dislocated on more servers. This is a question I’m asking.

An other relevant issue is then the preservation of our publication. I do not only refer so much to the technical aspects of safeguard and duplication of informations, that we think we shall be able to face by means of techniques of mirroring, as to the legal aspects of certification and guarantee of authenticity.

The recent agreement between the University of Florence and the National Library of Florence for the voluntary storage of digital scientific publications represents an important occasion in order to guarantee these scopes. But also in this case, I ask myself how could be guaranteed aspects like the updating, the review and the speed of information. Also this is an other question I ask.

A third issue, that derives in part from the previous ones, concerns the metadata of identification of the content and of bibliographical classification of the electronic publications. I’m not an expert on the subject, but, as an editor of an on line publication, I perceive the emergency to deal with the problem.

Anyhow, also in this case I raise a question: initiatives like ours that were born spontaneously outside of the traditional editorials practices must by force be condemned to lack a bibliographical identity unless they accept to be filtered through a publishing house? It would seem to me a serious case of marginalization, not to say of discrimination.

Finally, the issue of protection of the rights of intellectual property. I confess that it is a kind of problem I do not perceive to be quite as dramatic as it appear to all the publishers, for obvious economic reasons.

RM politics have been from the start to guarantee free access and with no charge full-text reading, without limitations of economic sort. This policy is surely suggested by the home-made nature, of direct editors of the scientific community that we represent, of our initiative.