Public publishing on the web between autonomy and control: from ‘feudalism’ to ‘federation’?

Abstract

The article, after some methodological notes and some pieces of information on the history of public publishing in Italy, focuses on the dissemination of official publications on the sites of the public administration. The underlying trends are identified in the emergence of open data and open government, in strong decentralization and in the weakening of any form of bibliographic control. After some examples taken from the experience of the most important European countries, the article concludes hoping for the development of a federation project of public publishing, based on decentralization and the use of standards, according to the open access model of institutional archives.