Fear of FAIR? Towards a new Italian incentive to oral data curation

This paper deals with the climate of distrust permeating contemporary society and how it may affect the researchers’ adherence to initiatives dealing with the promotion of data FAIRness. A case in point is the perplexing state of a recent Italian action, a new census of Tuscan oral archives (Gra.fo Reloaded project) in which the respondents were asked to disclose several details about the oral documents they gathered. As a potential alternative strategy to get the ball of data curation rolling, this paper explores the current utilitarian mindset adopted by major international linguistics communities and details its application to the conception of a novel Italian academic outlet: Oral Archives Journal (OAr), a journal on oral archive conservation, description, and use, as well as on speech transcription, technologies, legal issues, and research ethics.