Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager will give a presentation about open science training at the 9th UNICA Scholarly Communication Seminar, which takes place at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

The 9th UNICA seminar theme is ‘Academic Libraries & Open Science: how to meet the challenges?’ UNICA is an institutional network of 51 universities from 37 capital cities of Europe, combining over 160,000 staff and 1,900,000 students. 

Join us in this webinar to find out more about Coko (the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation) and their community-based approach to developing open and shared publishing infrastructure.

Guided by the vision, ‘better, faster, more open publishing’, Coko facilitates publishers, funders, developers, researchers, service providers, and others to work together to build publishing infrastructure that everyone can benefit from. 

Nine public library trainers from Namibia who recently attended EIFL training in library management and planning new services will pass on their knowledge and skills to their colleagues within the Namibia Library and Archives Service (NLAS).

Five public library trainers from the Kenya National Library Service (KNLS) will train 18 public librarians from 12 KNLS libraries in communications and advocacy skills.

The five trainers learnt training skills as part of a major EIFL-KNLS initiative to strengthen continued professional development of public librarians in Kenya. They attended communications and advocacy training organized by EIFL and KNLS in March 2019, and are now passing on their knowledge and skills to their colleagues.

Our guest blogger, Dr Jane Secker, is Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at City, University of London. EIFL invited Jane and partner, Chris Morrison, Copyright, Software Licensing and Policy Manager at the University of Kent, to the 2019 EIFL General Assembly.

We were proud to celebrate our 20th birthday with more than 70 people during the 2019 EIFL General Assembly (GA), which took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, from 8 - 10 August. Participants in the GA included delegates from our network of library consortia in 33 countries, representatives of our partners in the publishing industry, and members of the EIFL management board and staff team.

‘The Marrakesh Treaty: Getting Started’ is a practical, interactive workshop for librarians on how to start using the Marrakesh Treaty for people with print disabilities. It is aimed at countries in Eastern, Central Europe and the Baltic States that have joined the Marrakesh Treaty, and where implementation into national law is completed or advanced. Participants from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia, as well as Finland, Canada, the UK and the US, are expected to attend.

Librarians at the universities of Dagon and East Yangon in Yangon, Myanmar, will take part in a two-day workshop to improve their capacity to make the best use of e-resources provided through the EIFL eLibrary Myanmar project to support law faculty to deliver newly-developed courses on human rights law.  In addition librarians will be trained to assist students in planning and researching for moot courts.

EIFL eLibrary Myanmar Project Capacity Building Manager, Ruth Bird, will facilitate  a three-day workshop for members of the law faculties at the universities of Dagon and East Yangon in Yangon, Myanmar.

The workshop aims to support law faculty members to deliver newly-developed courses in human rights law. Topics to be covered include how to make the best use of the legal e-resources provided through the EIFL eLibrary Myanmar project, and preparing and conducting moot courts.

We have updated and revised How To Make Your DSpace Repository Work Really Well, the EIFL checklist that repository managers and administrators, librarians and others can use to improve institutional open access (OA) repositories that use DSpace free and open source software.

DSpace is the most commonly used repository software in EIFL partner countries.

EIFL began working in Zimbabwe in 2005, at a time when open access (OA) was just starting to be recognized and practised globally. Our first project in Zimbabwe was to support an OA awareness campaign and the creation of an OA repository at the University of Zimbabwe. Launched in 2005, the University of Zimbabwe Institutional Repository, was the first institutional OA repository in the EIFL network.

The Serbian government has passed a new law on science and research that recognizes open science as a fundamental principle of science and research.

The new Law on Science and Research, passed on 8 July 2019, confirms Serbia’s commitment to open science. It comes just a year after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development (MESTD), the main national funder of research in Serbia, adopted a national open science policy, the Platform for Open Science, mandating open science to all publicly funded research.

The second Open Science Fair, under the banner ‘Synergies for Sustainable, Open & Responsible Research’, is to take place at the University of Minho in Porto, Portugal.

The fair is a joint initiative of the European Union projects OpenAIRE, FIT4RRI, the EOSC Secretariat and FAIRsFAIR. It will showcase the elements required for the transition to open science: e-infrastructures and services, policies as guidance for good practices, research flows and new types of activities (disseminate, mine, review, assess, etc.). 

We are inviting librarians and researchers to take part in a webinar about digital humanities - a new way of doing scholarship that involves collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. The webinar is jointly organized by EIFL, Global Outlook::Digital Humanities and Programming Historian.

In May 2019, six young African public librarians travelled to Denmark to take part in an intensive week-long learning, knowledge-sharing and networking experience that included participation in the Next Library 2019 conference in Aarhus (2 - 4 June), which was attended by over 400 people from 44 countries. The six young librarians, from Ghana, Kenya, Namibia and Zambia, were participants in the EIFL Initiative for Young African Library Innovators (IYALI) 2019 programme.

EIFL’s work with over 40 universities and research institutes in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda over the past three years has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of research published in open access (OA) in the three east African countries. 

We will be celebrating our 20th anniversary at the 2019 EIFL General Assembly, our major knowledge-sharing event of the year, which takes place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, from 8 to 10 August.

This year’s GA is hosted by the American University of Central Asia, a non-profit higher education institution also known as AUCA.

Open access (OA) has special significance in Palestine, a divided country with restrictions on movement between its two parts, the West Bank and Gaza. The restrictions make it difficult for scholars to meet to share knowledge, and OA can help to overcome this challenge. 

EIFL’s support for OA in Palestine began in 2009, when we supported the first national open access awareness raising workshop for Palestinian universities. At that time, most Palestinian universities had not yet embraced OA, and awareness about OA was limited. 

The FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Union Research) project has supported researchers and research organizations to move beyond simply being aware of open science approaches to being able to apply them in their research workflows.

In May 2019, I joined six young public library innovators from Africa at the 3rd African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) Conference and 5th African Library Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference was a rich learning ground for the young librarians, who were all there as a result of their participation in the Initiative for Young African Library Innovators (IYALI).