The process of self-archiving is fundamental in the new model of scholarly communication and it has not to be confused with self publishing or vanity press. The process of self-archiving is the first step within the system of scientific dissemination based on the deposit of your own research outputs in open access archives. Self-archived research outputs maximize and facilitate research impact supporting the access to research. The limits imposed by copyright are an obstacle to the free dissemination of the outputs and they encourage the raise of journals’ prices. We should talk with authors in order to persuade them that a review of the publishing contracts towards the conservation of rights is necessary. We should start to deposit the pre-print and post-print of our papers in appropriate institutional repository in order to encourage a wider dissemination of knowledge. According to some statistics, citation rates of online papers is 336% superior to the citation rates of the same papers in print version. Among researchers, the majority of them deposit their works in institutional server or in subject based-server: the firsts are the physicians, the economists, the mathematician, the astronomers and, recently, chemists and experts of biomedicine too. Nevertheless, nowadays the process of self-archiving is not so established yet, not only in Italy. It is important to understand the reasons for this inertia and, above all, to clarify the actual use of repositories by scholars through the analysis of their community behaviour. Some statistics on the use of repositories among the Open Archives at international level are presented in this paper. In addition, this paper includes some proposals aiming at increasing the consensus  to Open Archives thanks to the process of self-archiving.