The EIFL General Assembly is our major knowledge sharing event of the year. This year, we will be holding a virtual General Assembly via Zoom. 

Would you like to know more about Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and the role they play in building open research infrastructures? Join this introductory one-hour LIBSENSE webinar.

Date: Monday, 7 September. 
Time: 11:00 GMT (check your time).
To register: Click here to register.

Iryna Kuchma, Manager of the EIFL Open Access Programme, will give a presentation on open science policies at the NI4OS-Europe (National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe) training event on open science for Moldova.

We are happy to announce that the EIFL Public Library Innovation Award - for public library services that improve lives - is now open for applications.

COVID-19 has made 2020 a difficult year, disrupting personal and professional lives everywhere. That’s why we’re launching the award earlier this year, to give you extra time to complete your applications. 

We’re also including a new Innovation Award  category - for new public library services introduced to help communities struggling to cope with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

EIFL has renewed its agreement with the software and services company Eclat Engineering for a further three years. Through the agreement, libraries and consortia in 37 EIFL partner countries are eligible for discounted pricing to Eclat Engineering’s two products, RemoteXs and MyLOFT, which facilitate a seamless anywhere-anytime access to a library’s subscribed e-resources.

The EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme team will conduct a workshop titled ‘Creating magical innovation in our libraries, with a little help from our peers’ at the Occupy Library 2020 conference. 

Members of the EIFL network will participate in the Asia Open Access Meeting 2020, which takes place virtually this year, under the theme ‘Building a Sustainable, Asian Knowledge Commons for Open Science Era’.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) are the meeting hosts. 

EIFL has organized and will present at this workshop about the Myanmar Education, Research and Learning Portal (MERAL) for Mandalay University of Distance Education (MUDE). There are two joining options for participants - in-person, at MUDE in Mandalay, and online. 

EIFL staff will attend the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) 2020 conference, which will take place online during the week of 21 to 25 September. 

The conference will address open access at a time of global challenge, and the demands and opportunities for open scholarship in relation to past and future crises. OASPA 2020 will also be a forum for reflection on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing efforts to ensure scholarship is open and accessible to all.

Sessions will explore - 

Participation by member states and observers in the 61st series of meetings of the Assemblies of the Member States of WIPO takes place this year online and in Geneva, due to coronavirus restrictions.

Topics of special interest to EIFL are general statements (agenda item 5), Report on the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) (agenda item 11), and the Assembly of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (agenda item 23).

Editors and publishers, researchers, librarians and tool builders are invited to join the third in a series of four LIBSENSE online meeting on ‘Co-designing collaborative free and open source open access publishing infrastructures’.

The meetings are organized by the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), EIFL and the Coko Foundation. 

The third meeting will focus on requirements and areas for collaboration on shared free and open source open access publishing infrastructure 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 ORCID and what it offers librarians and researchers.

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: