  Cosmic Ray (CR) acceleration still challenges the researchers. Fast particles
may be accelerated in astrophysical environments by a variety of processes.
Acceleration in magnetic reconnection sites in particular, has lately attracted
the attention of researchers not only for its potential importance in the solar
system context, but also in other astrophysical environments, like compact
stellar sources, AGNs and GRBs, and even in diffusive media like the ISM and
the IGM, especially when the environment is magnetically dominated. In this
talk we review this process and also present three-dimensional collisional MHD
simulations with the injection of thousands of test particles showing from the
evolution of their energy spectrum that they can be efficiently accelerated by
reconnection through a first-order Fermi process within large scale magnetic
current sheets (especially when local turbulence is present which makes
reconnection fast and the acceleration layer thicker).
