Enhancing diffusion of scientific contents: Open data in Open Archives

The free availability of data gathered during research activities is becoming one of the new challenges facing the Open Access Movement. New scientific instruments and technologies used in highly collaborative fields such as molecular biology, astronomy and environmental sciences, make it possible to collect a great amount of data in different formats. Moreover, data are often associated with tools that can aggregate them as well as with direct references to the publications - conventional or non-conventional - that report the results of their analysis. The benefits of the availability of these data are evident, and include assessment of research results, along with the reproduction and re-utilisation of data, potentially to draw new insight for future research