摘要:This brief essay describes the state of the art of Italian open access journals. After an introduction on how the open access movement has developed in Italy, the author analyses the presence of Italian OA journals in international directories, and focuses on the different kind of journals publishers. At the end of the essay, the author briefly examines OA journals within the journal list developed by an expert group for the recently completed research quality evaluation (VQR 2004-2010) .