In 2014, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) issued open access policies to make their research openly available. These policies are producing results, and open access and open data are steadily growing in China.

2015 was a busy year for everyone involved in promoting open access (OA) in Serbia, but results were positive, says Milica Ševkušić, EIFL’s OA Country Coordinator in Serbia.

Achievements that Serbia’s OA movement can be especially proud of include increases in the quality and quantity of OA content; a successful OA education programme for researchers and publishers, and progress in setting up institutional OA repositories.

Tomorrow’s world: a guessing game

‘Tomorrow’s World’, BBC television’s flagship popular science programme that began in 1965 and ran for almost 40 years, featured new scientific developments each week and sometimes put inventions to the test live on air.

Three days, four tracks, 75 sessions

Open access – the immediate, online, free and unrestricted availability of research results – is a powerful solution to the barriers that researchers in developing and transition economy countries face in accessing and sharing critical research that can improve people’s lives.

In collaboration with our global network of partners, we have contributed substantially to open access (OA) in developing and transition economy countries. In 2016 - 2017, we’ll be taking stock of our progress and taking our OA programme to the next level.

EIFL has released a new video about a mobile library project that takes solar-powered laptop computers and internet to poorly resourced schools to give struggling children hands on computer practice.

The video features Western Regional Library’s first visit to Archbishop Amissah Junior High School in Western Region, and the school’s first hands on computer class.

Over 50 research funders and representatives of research organizations from 15 countries attended workshops in Budapest, Hungary, to revisit the Horizon 2020 open access (OA) mandate, to examine OA policy developments in Europe, and to share examples of best practice in OA policy development and implementation.

EIFL and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences together organized the workshops, which were held on 29-30 October, within the framework of the PASTEUR4OA  project.

“Yesterday we had nothing, today we have the world of knowledge at our fingertips,” a professor of mathematics at the University of Laos told me after attending the first-ever e-resources training offered by the Laos Library and Information Consortium (LALIC).

That was in 2005 - and what a long way LALIC has come in 10 years.

LALIC celebrated it’s 10th anniversary at its annual meeting by giving member libraries the opportunity to present their achievements from the past 10 years.

In September, EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme (EIFL-PLIP) team members and representatives of EIFL-PLIP grantee libraries travelled to Aarhus – named by some studies the happiest city in Denmark  – to attend Next Library 2015 festival, and to celebrate the opening of the new Aarhus Central Library, also known as Dokk1.

Over 350 people from 30 countries took part in the festival, and everyone was intrigued by Dokk1.

With e-books more and more popular among library users, librarians are faced with the choice of different purchasing models: annual subscription, perpetual access purchases (including Patron-Driven Acquisition or Demand-Driven Acquisition), or Short Term Loan. EIFL Licensing Programme Manager, Romy Beard, blogs about annual subscriptions to e-book collections, which still prove to be a popular business model.