The Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B - 2017] had been sitting on the desk of President Cyril Ramaphosa for over a year waiting to be signed into law. In June 2020, when Blind South Africa issued a legal challenge over the delay, the President acted.

In Part II of this two-part blog, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager Teresa Hackett examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of the right to research through two key issues, text and data mining and digital preservation by cultural heritage institutions, and how WIPO’s proven formula could address the issues.

EIFL and partners have received a grant for a project that will enable 25 public and community libraries to provide digital literacy training to thousands of women and unemployed youth and connect them to free online learning opportunities.

Librarians from institutions of higher education in Africa are invited to join this LIBSENSE online workshop to discuss the current and future skills and roles of librarians in open science.

Guest Speaker John Willinsky, Stanford University, USA, will initiate discussion with a presentation titled, ‘What I’ve Learned from Librarians: Becoming Partners in Sharing Knowledge’. Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, will facilitate a breakout session.

In order to help researchers retrieve legal copies of full-text articles that they can’t find in their library, EIFL has created a poster with useful links to other places where they can look for an article they need, such as open access search engines or browser extensions.

We are encouraging librarians to share the poster widely with faculty and students through their university and institutional websites, newsletters and social media. EIFL can help libraries customize the poster, for example, by adding the library’s logo and links to the library’s subscribed e-resources. 

EIFL welcomed the opportunity to submit comments on Brazil’s implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities. The comments focused on Article 4(4) of the treaty, an optional provision that allows a country to confine exceptions to works that are not available on the commercial market under reasonable terms, the so-called ‘commercial availability test’.

Just 48% of people in Uganda are using the internet, according to the Uganda Communications Commission (2019). The three main obstacles to internet use are lack of free or affordable access to technology, a lack of computer and online literacy skills, and limited awareness about the wealth of information, education, employment, communication and other opportunities the internet has to offer.

EIFL has renewed its agreement with Oxford University Press for 30 e-resources, including journals, online databases and e-book collections. 

The list of e-resources includes: 

In the news! EIFL and partners feature in this Citi Newsroom (CNR) article about our successful mobile library project that led to a significant increase in the pass rate of students sitting for ICT in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in under-resourced schools in Ghana between 2016 and 2019.

Article title: Library Authority, EIFL’s mobile library project raises pass rate in BECE

Publication/media outlet:  Citi Newsroom (CNR)

Date published: 20 July 2020

cOALition S - a group of national research funding organizations and charitable foundations committed to making full and immediate open access to research publications a reality - has announced a Rights Retention Strategy for researchers. 

Editors and publishers, researchers, librarians and tool builders - join us in this LIBSENSE online meeting to discuss ‘Co-designing collaborative free and open source open access publishing infrastructures’ in Africa.

This is the second in a series of four online meetings on the topic, organized by the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), EIFL and the Coko Foundation. 

The meeting will focus on identifying requirements and areas for collaboration on shared free and open source open access publishing infrastructure.

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, will give a keynote address at the University of Zurich Open Science Summer School on the Fundamentals of Open Data, Research Data Management, and Open Access. 

Kuchma’s address will take place on 28 August, on the topic OpenAIRE and Open Science

Find out more about the Summer School.

June was a busy month for the LIBSENSE Initiative - a collaborative space through which libraries and research and education networks (RENs) are advancing open access and open science in Africa.

EIFL and our partner consortium in Ghana, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana  (CARLIGH), are co-hosting a webinar on institutional repository management. 

Institutional repository managers and librarians, faculty members, researchers, IT staff, university administrators from Ghana, and others who are interested in scholarly publishing, are welcome to attend. 

The 41st session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) takes place in Geneva from 30 November to 4 December, 2020.

EIFL will participate in the session when delegates from WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) member states discuss limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives, education and research, and a proposed treaty for the protection of broadcast organizations, among other topics.

EIFL will take part in the 15th Internet Governance Forum 2020 (IGF 2020) which will be held online this year as part of international efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

The overarching theme of IGF 2020 is ‘Internet United’. The main thematic tracks are Data; Environment; Inclusion; Trust. 

EIFL is delighted to present the webinar, ‘E-resources during COVID-19: copyright and licensing issues’, in cooperation with the association of African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA).

The webinar is free and open to all library and information professionals. 

OpenEdition is a French open access publisher, run by Cleo, the centre for open electronic publishing. Through the agreement with EIFL, OpenEdition provides free institutional access to its Freemium for Journals collection of 175 journals, published by university presses and small academic publishers until December 2022.

The journals cover the subjects of humanities and social sciences. About 80% of the publications are in French, and half of the journals regularly publish articles in more than one language, including English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) COVID-19 Working Group has released the final version of its guidelines and recommendations on how data from multiple disciplines inform responses to a pandemic and can be shared under the present COVID-19 circumstances.

In Part I of this two-part blog, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager Teresa Hackett looks at the immediate challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has posed for the copyright and licensing framework as education moves online. In Part II, to be published in July, we will examine the implications of the pandemic on the right to research, the right of preservation by cultural heritage institutions, and how the global copyright community should best respond.