In the years that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, unemployment in the Caribbean Island of St Lucia rose by 8%, to an alarming 25%. Youth unemployment on the island is estimated to be over 30%.  In the rural district of Micoud in the southeastern part of the island, jobs are especially scarce. Without the hope of finding jobs, teenagers are not motivated to study further when they leave secondary school, and many can be seen idle in the village streets.

All across the world, people are facing challenging environmental problems – pollution and waste, deforestation, extinction of species, global warming, changing weather patterns and rising sea levels, to name a few. As a result, environmental studies has become an important school subject in many countries – but in Polish schools, the subject is neglected.

Most young Lithuanians choose to study subjects in the social sciences and humanities, and in 2014, just 6% of college and university students registered for courses related to information and communication technology (ICT). However, Lithuania needs more ICT and engineering specialists to ensure that the economy grows and remains competitive, according to recent Lithuanian labour market surveys.

EIFL has updated its draft law on copyright to include a simplified and shortened provision on persons with disabilities.

The update comes as the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled is set to enter into force on 30 September 2016, following its ratification by 20 member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Webinar: OpenAIRE and EUDAT are co-presenting this popular webinar which introduces researchers, data librarians, project coordinators and research officers to the process of writing Data Management Plans.

In March and May this year, EIFL convened meetings of over 20 leading Croatian public librarians and library advocates to develop a vision for public libraries in the context of Croatia’s national development strategies and priorities.

Today the British Library, one of the world’s largest research libraries, is terminating its international non-commercial document delivery service.

Until 2012 the Overseas Library Privilege Service - backed by a copyright exception - had been meeting the needs of researchers around the world for five decades.

In this blog, Teresa Hackett, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager, reveals the data behind the demise of the British Library’s international non-commercial document supply service, reinforcing the argument that such services should be regulated by copyright law, not by licence.

Document delivery is a vital service in meeting the particular information needs of individual researchers, students and scholars.

EIFL is delighted to learn that Canada today became the 20th country to accede to the Marrakesh Treaty for persons with print disabilities.

This means that the treaty will enter into force on 30 September 2016 when countries that are party to the treaty will be allowed for the first time to create accessible format copies, and to exchange these copies across borders.

EIFL has signed a renewal agreement with Oxford University Press for Oxford Journals and Online Products. 

The Oxford Journals Collection includes 285 high quality online journals in medicine, life sciences, mathematics and physical sciences, law, the humanities and social sciences.

The Online Products include various databases, covering subjects like art, music, biography, law, general reference and medicine.

EIFL has signed a renewal agreement with Cambridge University Press for Cambridge Journals Online.

Webinar: Learn how Poland’s new copyright law brought library services in Poland into the twenty-first century. The guest speaker is Barbara Szczepanska who advocated for libraries during the two-year public consultation process.

EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, Iryna Kuchma, shares a checklist for fine-tuning open access repositories that are built with DSpace software. The checklist is drawn from a series of seven webinars organized by EIFL, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, United Kingdom) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa), from January to May 2016.

The European Commission-funded project PASTEUR4OA ( short for Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research), in which EIFL is a partner, is drawing to a close. Based on the project, PASTEUR4OA partners have developed a set of useful resources:

OA policy guidelines for research performing organizations and funders

To help research performing organizations and funders develop efficient open access (OA) policies, PASTEUR4OA has developed guidelines and a model policy (template). See -

Two EIFL Open Access Programme team members will take part in meetings and events at ETD 2016: ‘Data and Dissertations’: 19th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

Webinar: Join this webinar organized by EIFL, COAR, OpenAIRE and DIGITAL.CSIC to find out more about what innovative services like altmetrics and open peer review repositories can provide to researchers and research institutions. 

Isabel Bernal (DIGITAL.CSIC manager) will talk about integrating altmetrics and open peer review modules into DIGITAL.CSIC, which is the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council.

A Task Force chaired by EIFL has released two new librarians’ competency profiles that will help to build capacity in libraries for supporting new roles in the area of scholarly communication and e-research.

The librarians’ competency profiles were released during the  ELPUB 2016 conference, which took place from 7 - 9 June in Göttingen, Germany.

Two EIFL Open Access (OA) Programme team members will take part in a series of FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Union Research) project meetings and the LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) annual conference.

China’s first ‘Fair Use Week’ took place in Beijing City on 19-20 May 2016 with the theme ‘Copyright issues in information services’. The event was co-organized by the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LCAS), EIFL’s partner, and is one of four library-organized events in China in 2016.

Fair use is an example of a flexible copyright exception that is currently stimulating interest among academics and policy-makers around the world.

Article title: Myanmar librarians’ study tour to Hong Kong

Publication/media outlet: LibraryLearningSpace.com

Date published: 01 June 2016

EIFL project/programme: EIFL Licensing Programme

Language of article: English