Conference Program

Taking Italian university presses and institutional service providers as a key analytical lens, the paper uses this field to interrogate the core question of the panel: how, under neoliberal governance, the Italian university system negotiates the challenges to academic freedom, equity, and critical thinking in a context reshaped by the changing ANVUR (Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes) evaluation system.

Drawing on 14 in‑depth interviews with directors and staff of 11 university presses and 3 institutional platforms, the contribution examines self‑representations, organizational and economic models, and future visions in relation to open access, research evaluation, and artificial intelligence.

The main research question is whether—and under which conditions—Italian university presses can still be understood as public infrastructures safeguarding academic freedom, equitable access to knowledge, and critical inquiry, or whether their development trajectories are being progressively realigned with market logics structuring research and scholarly publishing. Around this question, the paper develops three intertwined analytical axes: a) Tensions between ethical–political commitments to open access (often in diamond form) and economic and reputational sustainability within an evaluation regime still strongly oriented to ranked outlets; b) structural constraints—small size, underfunding, and work overload—and attempts to respond through the construction of (national vs. international) infrastructures (UPI—University Press Italiane, FedOAPress—Federico II Open Access Press, and Share—Scholarly Heritage and Access to Research, diamond hubs); c) the ambivalences opened up by generative AI regarding the reuse of open content, the protection of authorship, and the automation of editorial labor.

​Findings show, first, a wide spectrum of positions on open access, ranging from strongly principled diamond models fully supported by universities to more cautious strategies that foreground revenue risks, competition with commercial publishers, and the limited and often incoherent recognition of open access within ANVUR‑driven evaluation and funding tools. Second, they highlight chronically under‑resourced organizations that are pushed towards inter‑university cooperation and shared platforms, while a robust national infrastructure for open publishing—envisaged in policy documents but not yet implemented—remains largely aspirational. Third, interviews depict generative AI as a double-edged development: explored as technical support, yet predominantly perceived as a threat in terms of uncontrolled reuse of content, weak license enforcement, and further opacity of intellectual labor. In this perspective, the everyday editorial practices of Italian university presses emerge as key sites where the question, 'Whose university is it?' ’is played out through the concrete tensions between performance‑driven survival and the ethical mission of academic freedom, equity, and critical inquiry.