The WZB mourns Alessandro Blasetti

It is with great dismay and sadness that we have learned of the unexpected death of our colleague Alessandro Blasetti.

Alessandro Blasetti began his work at the WZB in 2008 as a student assistant in the library. He completed his studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with flying colors in 2014. His minor in Library Science was a good fit for his duties at the WZB, as during this time the WZB library developed a distinct focus on Open Access, the unrestricted and free access to scientific information. This area continued to evolve through Alessandro Blasetti's efforts. With his help, retro-digitizations were successfully carried out in the "OA 1000+" project, an Open Access policy was adopted, and a workflow for secondary publications of scientific papers was set up that is still in use today, among other things.

In 2016, Alessandro Blasetti became the first Open Access Advisor at the WZB and fulfilled this role with his characteristic dedication in an extremely competent manner. Numerous WZB researchers could rely on him to exhaust all options to make their publications publicly available in Open Access. The result was the WZB's extraordinarily high Open Access rate. Alessandro Blasetti was also active beyond the WZB, including as a section spokesperson in the Leibniz Association's Open Access working group and as an evaluator for the Leibniz Association's Open Access fund.

Alessandro Blasetti's death comes as a shock to the WZB community and far beyond. He was an extremely valued colleague - proficient, impressive, connective. Our deepest sympathies go out to his son, his family, and his friends.

Berlin, February 2023