EIFL has signed a renewal agreement with the Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing for its collection of journals, IOPscience. The IOPscience Standard Package includes 52 high impact journals, and the IOPscience Premium Package gives access to 90 journals. Subjects covered are biological physics, chemistry, engineering, environment, mathematics, medical physics, and general physics.

EIFL has negotiated free access to the Standard Package for some EIFL partner countries, and discounted access to the Premium Package and/or the Standard Package for others.

2019 was another great year for the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities, confirming its place as WIPO’s fastest moving and most successful treaty. Thirteen more countries joined the treaty in 2019, including two EIFL partner countries - Thailand and Zimbabwe. 

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, joins a team of 11 researchers to conduct open science policy research initiated by the Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia.

The research aims to develop a roadmap for implementing open science in Latvia, and to make recommendations for a national Latvian open science policy. 

The exam results for junior high school children in Ghana are out - and our mobile library Hands-on Computer Classes project has achieved its best results yet! 

In 2019, the average pass rate for the subject ICT in the Basic Education Certificate Exam (B.E.C.E.) for children who took part in the mobile libraries’ practical computer skills classes in three regions was 92%.

EIFL has renewed its current agreement with JSTOR to provide free and discounted access to the JSTOR Archive Journals. The agreement  includes about 2,500 journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. All issues, from Volume 1, Issue 1, are provided for every journal up to the moving wall, including all previous and related titles. 

DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) is convening a workshop for trainers in projects related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to discuss future training initiatives and how to improve training provision in 2020.

Two teams of Namibian public library trainers will train 15 librarians in the topics Digital Literacy and Modern Library Spaces.

Digital inclusion was one of the main themes at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2019 in Berlin (25 - 29 November), presenting opportunities to highlight the role of libraries in providing meaningful access to the internet. Ramune Petuchovaite, EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme Manager, shares highlights from the event.

The OpenAIRE project has become a fully-fledged non-profit organization - OpenAIRE A.M.K.E - creating a permanent platform for open science policy alignment, development of open scholarly communication infrastructure and open science training in Europe.

Join this webinar to find out more about the Phenom free and open source multi-tenanted journal publishing platform from Hindawi, which is one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed, fully open access journals. 

Andrew Smeall, Chief Product Officer at Hindawi, will introduce the Phenom manuscript submission and peer review platform, and show how it can be adapted and reused by other publishers. 

Within the global transition to open access, libraries are trying to understand the total cost paid to publishers, both for subscriptions to content and for publishing of open access articles by their corresponding authors. While libraries know what they pay for subscriptions, determining open access publishing costs - namely the amount of Article Processing Charges (APCs) - paid to publishers can be difficult. One way of estimating the amount spent on APCs is to look at publication output data, and calculate based on average APC data. 

EIFL has signed a new agreement with Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP) that provides free access to MSP’s 17 journals specialized in mathematics and related sciences.

The agreement is valid until December 2022, and is open to libraries in 29 EIFL partner countries:

In a letter to Cyril Ramaphosa, President of the Republic of South Africa, EIFL urged the President to sign into law the long-awaited Copyright Amendment Bill without delay. The Bill, amending the 1978 Copyright Act, was approved by the legislature in March 2019 and awaits the Presidential assent. The Bill introduces new exceptions for libraries, education and people with disabilities, and brings copyright rules in South Africa into the digital age.

Rima Kupryte, EIFL Director, and Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, will meet stakeholders to discuss the  Myanmar Education Research and Learning Portal (MERAL) 

The meeting, with the project working group, will review content policy and the structure, functionalities and management of the portal.

The 40th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) takes place in Geneva from 29 June to 3 July, 2020.

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

In particular, member states will continue negotiations to reach agreement on the future work programme on limitations and exceptions.

A team of librarians from EIFL partner countries, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda/USA, participated in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/39) that met in Geneva from 21-25 October 2019. 

Five public librarians from four countries in Africa will travel to the USA where they will take part in the Public Library Association (PLA) 2020 Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, as part of the Initiative for Young African Library Innovators 2020 (IYALI 2020). 

EIFL has signed another three-year agreement with Prio Infocenter AB to allow institutions in 39 EIFL partner countries to subscribe to the Urkund plagiarism checker at discounted rates.

Plagiarism refers to copying another person's material and using this material as if it were your own work, without quoting the originator or stating a source.

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, and Gwen Franck, EIFL Open Access Programme Coordinator, will participate in the OpenAIRE General Assembly.

Kuchma will moderate a breakout session on training and support for the OpenAIRE Standing Committee, and a session on training for OpenAIRE Advance. 

Kuchma and Franck will moderate the meeting of 12 OpenAIRE NOADs (National Open Access Desks) from Eastern Europe.

Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, will facilitate a half-day workshop on open science training during the 9th International Youth Science Forum 'Litteris et Artibus'.

The workshop will cover the following tips for trainers: