Digital Libraries: Supporting Open Science

The Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries (IRCDL) is the annual Italian forum to discuss research topics on Digital Libraries and related technical, practical, and social issues. Along the years, IRCDL touched several aspects underlying the ?Digital Library" domain and promptly adapted to the evolution of the field. Today, the ?Digital Library" field includes theory and practices reflecting the evolution of the role of libraries in the scholarly communication domain, and also embracing scholarly communication and open science. The theme of IRCDL 2019 was ?Digital Libraries: Supporting Open Science". Three main reasons motivated this theme: (i) science is increasingly becoming digital, meaning that research is performed using data services and digital tools; (ii) the results of the research are no longer just traditional scientific publications; (iii) the outcomes of science are increasingly encompassing datasets, software, and experiments. As digital artifacts, such products can be shared and re-used together with the article, thus enabling comprehensive research assessment and various degrees of reproducibility of science. Positive consequences of this shift towards Open Science are: accelerating science, optimizing the cost of research, fraud detection, and fullyfledged scientific reward. Digital Libraries are central in the evolution of research outputs by targeting findability, preservation, interlinking, and re-use of research products and by integrating the components of the scholarly communication process. The conference has been organized in Pisa, and the proceedings are published in the Springer CCIS series Vol. 988 [22]. Pre-print versions, research datasets, and research software relative to the accepted contributions are accessible via Zenodo.org.