All the best for the holiday season and the New Year, with warm wishes from the EIFL Board and team. Thank you to everyone who has worked with us in 2024. We look forward to working with you again in 2025.

The first meeting of the new Community of Practice (CoP) formed to support editors and publishers of no-fee open access journals and books in Africa takes place on 22 January 2025 at 10:00 UTC. 

First in a series of EIFL webinars about using Open Journal Systems (OJS) free and open source software that facilitates the management and publishing of scholarly journals. The webinars will focus on interesting examples of OJS implementation. 

Webinar 1 -

Iryna Kuchma and Milica Ševkušić from the EIFL Open Access Programme will participate in the public launch of the EU-funded project, ALMASI: Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally, on 14 January, and the public launch of the European Diamond Capacity Hub, on 15 January. The events will be hosted by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), and will take place at the Museo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (MUNCYT). 

Iryna Kuchma and Milica Ševkušić from the EIFL Open Access Programme will participate in the kick-off meeting of the new EU-funded project ALMASI: Aligning and Mutualizing Nonprofit Open Access Publishing Services Internationally. The event will be hosted by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), and it will take place at the Museo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. 

EIFL has renewed and expanded its agreement with World Scientific for one year, until 2025. The renewed agreement provides waived or discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs) for authors to publish in 148 hybrid or gold open access journals in various fields, up from 111 in the previous agreement. 

Over the last three decades, World Scientific has established itself as the largest international scientific publisher in the Asia-Pacific region. 

EIFL has negotiated waived APCs for 26 EIFL partner countries, and discounted access APCs for 8 EIFL partner countries.

EIFL is one of several international partners that have come together to form ALMASI, a project that aims to provide the research community with an aligned, nonprofit, high-quality, and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem spanning three world regions: Africa, Europe and Latin America. 

EIFL’s Iryna Kuchma participated in the Ukrainian Open Science Forum in Lviv (21-23 November 2024), and shares news about the launch of the Ukrainian Reproducibility Network.

Based at an African organization and publishing a no-fee open access (OA) journal or books? Apply to join a new Community of Practice that launches in December 2024. 

Over 140 African no-fee journal editors have already expressed their interest in participating in the Community of Practice to share experiences, discuss opportunities for collaborations and partnerships, and collectively advocate for no-fee OA publishing (often referred to as Diamond OA) on the continent and globally. 

EIFL has renewed its agreement with the academic publisher, De Gruyter, for two more years, until 31 December 2026. 

The renewed agreement provides free and discounted access to the De Gruyter journals collection. In addition, the agreement includes free or discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs) for authors from EIFL partner countries for publishing articles in open  access in 363 De Gruyter Gold, Hybrid and Subscribe to Open (S2O) journals. 

Free or discounted reading access 

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, will speak about open science projects and initiatives at the 2nd international conference titled ‘Integrity, Open Science and Artificial Intelligence in Academia and Beyond: Meeting at the Crossroads’.

Further information about the conference, the conference organizers, topics and more.

EIFL has signed a three-year agreement with the Microbiology Society, allowing  authors from 33 EIFL partner countries to publish for free in all six fully open access and hybrid journals published by the society.

The agreement starts on 1 January 2025 and runs for three years, until 31 December 2027. 

The agreement includes waived article processing charges (APCs) for the following six journals:

The Open Science Day V (5 November 2024) revealed an interesting new trend in advancing open science in Serbia, writes Milica Ševkušić, Project Coordinator for the EIFL Open Access Programme, who was one of the presenters at the event.

EIFL and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have renewed an agreement to provide free access to the ACM Digital Library as well as free open access publishing for corresponding authors in ACM journals and conference proceedings for three years. The renewed agreement covers 25 EIFL partner countries and is valid until 31 December 2027.

Join us for the ninth EIFL online meet-up of open science trainers. Marjan Monshi from the Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania will share her recent experiences and ideas on training early career researchers on open science and research data management, and we will also address research software

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager,  will speak on ethical practices, journal indexing and no-fee (Diamond) open access publishing at this workshop hosted by the Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy. The journal is published by the Institute for Oil, Gas, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development (OGEES) at Afe Babalola University in Ado-Ekiti in southwest Nigeria. 

Britt-Marie Wideberg, EIFL Licensing Programme Manager, analyzes the amount of research published in open access in 2023 by authors from EIFL partner countries to find out how EIFL-negotiated open access agreements are making a difference.  

The third webinar in the DIAMAS Conversation Series for Libraries will focus on the DIAMAS Toolsuite and Guidelines – a set of tools and resources to support Diamond Open Access (ΟΑ) and the Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS).

Iryna Kuchma, Manager of the EIFL Open Access Programme, will provide an overview of no-fee open access publishing in Africa at the Regional Symposium on Democratizing Science in the Arab region.

EIFL, AJOL (African Journals Online) and WACREN (the West and Central African Research and Education Network) take pleasure in announcing the award of 17 grants that will strengthen the quality and sustainability of no-fee (Diamond) open access journals and journal hosting platforms across Africa. 

The grants, of up to US$20,000 each, were awarded to 17 projects focused on strengthening no-fee open access journals and open access journal platforms in nine countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia).