With the help of Maney Publishing, the Society for Italian Studies intends to scan and make available in electronic form all the back issues of Italian Studies from 1937 to 2004, the last issue not to appear in digital form. As a means of easy access to previously published articles and reviews, of which few subscribers will have copies, we expect this to be a resource of major importance to institutional subscribers and a considerable enhancement of the benefits of subscription.

Many of you will be familiar with the current procedure in which authors assign copyright (for both print and electronic publication) to the Society. This does not limit an author's ability to reuse material, but ensures that Maney, on our behalf, can protect the copyright internationally. The articles we published previously, however, were not administered in this way, nor was permission sought to obtain electronic rights. It would exceed the resources available to the Society to identify all the authors who have previously contributed to Italian Studies and obtain their permission to republish their work electronically (or that of their Estate executor where an author is deceased). In any case, many correspondence addresses held from the time of publication will no longer be current.

We are therefore writing this notice to ask for any authors (or executors) who object to the digitization of work in the journal and its dissemination to institutional subscribers to Italian Studies to inform the Senior Editor or Maney Publishing by 30 November 2009. If we have not heard from authors by that date, we will take permission as given. If permission is withdrawn, we will reluctantly omit single contributions from the scanned back archive. This would inevitably distort the historical record to a certain extent and would therefore be a great shame for the journal and for the Society, but we would of course respect the decision in all cases.

We will be proceeding with this scanning project in the next few months and need to ensure that notice of our intentions is disseminated widely. It is important that this notice be read by as many people as possible involved in the activities of the Society of Italian Studies and of the journal, and we would therefore be grateful if you could draw it to the attention of all your colleagues, particularly those who might have contributed to the journal in the past, but for whatever reason are no longer subscribers. To this end, you may also download a copy of this notice here in PDF format for ease of circulation.

If authors have any concerns about the process, they are welcome to contact the Senior Editor or Maney Publishing at any time.

Robert Gordon
Senior Editor, Italian Studies
Gonville and Caius College
Cambridge CB2 1TA
rscg1@cam.ac.uk

Maney Publishing
Liz Rosindale
l.rosindale@maney.co.uk