On 11 March 2015, the United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights presented her report ‘Copyright Policy and the Right to Science and Culture’ at the 28th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

EIFL has released a new video that shows the impact of an EIFL Open Access Programme (EIFL-OA) supported project that succeeded in opening up critical research from Kenyan researchers to the world.

The video features students, librarians, faculty and research administrator (DVC) from the University of Nairobi. The university is the largest in Kenya, serving over 60,000 students.

This month, in wintry Lithuania, I visited Emilija Banionyte, president of the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium (LMBA), and her team in their office in the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. Over a cup of hot coffee we discuss how LMBA ensures high usage of their licensed e-resources.

Jevgenija Sevcova, Manager of Databases at LMBA, explains that monitoring usage is essential in ensuring high usage, because it allows the consortium to identify and taregt institutions with low usage.

“Copyright divide in numbers”, the graph on the first page of the newly launched ‘The Copyright Manifesto. How the European Union should Support Innovation and Creativity through Copyright Reform’ tells a story.

We really didn’t know what to expect from the last WIPO meeting of 2014. Two previous sessions of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) had failed to reach agreement on its work, mainly due to opposition from the European Union and other high-income countries to the inclusion of libraries and archives on its agenda, that also led to a breakdown at the WIPO General Assemblies in October 2014.

EIFL-partner library consortia in three countries – Ghana, Kenya, Zambia commemorated their 10th anniversary in 2014.

“For me KLISC (the Kenyan Library and Information Consortium) is a dream come true,” remembers Jacinta Were, the former EIFL Country Coordinator for Kenya. “It was a difficult time with dramatic financial cuts to libraries and zero level budgets for journals. And then we collectively subscribed to information resources, and it worked!”

​“Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.”

With this quote from Robin Morgan – an American poet and political theorist and activist – Roshan Karn, Director of Open Access Nepal, opened the first Open Access Week ever held in Nepal.

Karn then addressed the 70 students who attended the Open Access Week 2014 conference on open access, open research data and open educational resources.

It was a long journey to get to this point. There were challenges and successes, cross-cultural learning, new friendships and incredible growth.

These were just some of the sentiments shared at the 2014 General Assembly (GA), as librarians, publishers, staff and invited speakers came together to mark EIFL’s 15th anniversary in Istanbul, Turkey.

“We have challenges, a lot of challenges in Kenya,” says Dr. Bessie Mukami, a general physician who serves at Embu General Provincial Hospital, a relatively large teaching hospital on the outskirts of the town of Embu in eastern Kenya.

“You have, maybe, one doctor to 10,000 people.”

In many countries, textbooks on particular areas of law such as criminal, constitutional or contract law become classics that are widely regarded by policy makers, lawyers and scholars alike as the authoritative source of information and opinion on the subject.

In Poland, the most prestigious work on copyright law is arguably ‘Copyright’, Volume 13 from the series ‘System of Private Law’ edited by Prof. Janusz Barta (in Polish: Prawo autorskie. System Prawa Prywatnego).