Growth in R&D spending drives number of researchers and research activity. In Italy, R&D spending growth is slower than global average, but is Italy is a highly productive research nation. Key trends in research information include more articles published as a result of more R&D spend and more researchers; rapid growth of open access over the past decade but remaining a small proportion of total articles published (7% in 2012); increased importance of non-article research objects such as datasets; use of multiple sources of data to improve analytics and tools, supported by supercomputers and big data techniques. A wide variety of participants now support the researcher in his/her journey to create new knowledge
