For some years now, the humanities in Italy have been obliged by evaluation procedures to follow the model of physical and biological research: more articles are published than books, articles to be credited with a scholar’s production must appear in journals that fall within the lists approved by the Ministry of Universities, and these, in order to maintain this status, tend to build monographic issues evaluated by peer review that considers not only the quality of the contribution but also its congruence with the general topic of the issue.
The quantity of publications also matters a great deal, which must be large enough to exceed the “medians” established not only to participate in competitions, but also to be commissioners there, serve on doctoral committees, etc. of The result is that scholars have great difficulty in pursuing large-scale organic projects, those that were once necessary to produce monographs, and that their work is found scattered over various topics and in journal issues that are often difficult for colleagues, students, and interested readers to retrieve.
“Insula Felix” intends to experiment way to help make such problems less acute starting with the field of semiotics, making available in a single virtual place the articles of scholars willing to contribute (at least those not bound by copyright) and indexing them by topic and keyword. The experiment will be conducted initially on publications from one discipline, semiotics, and will therefore be named “Bibliotheca semiotica.”