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).

In retrospect the clouds hovering above the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva look ominous (see photo for our news item on the 2014 WIPO General Assemblies).

EIFL was participating in the General Assemblies, WIPO’s main policy and decision-making bodies that took place from September 22 to 30, 2014.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), short courses that are delivered online for free, are said to be taking the academic world by storm. Thousands of courses in many languages are on offer from top universities all over the world.

One such offering is Copyright for Educators & Librarians, launched in 2014 by Duke University in the US. The aim of the course is to ‘begin to demystify the law and help educators and librarians do their jobs more effectively’.

EIFL has released a new video which shows the impact of an EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme (EIFL-PLIP) supported project that uses tablet computers to support children’s education in Kibera, the largest slum in Eastern Africa.

In a disagreement that split mainly along north-south lines, the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) failed for the second time this year to reach agreement on the conclusions of the session, and also couldn’t agree on the all-important recommendations to WIPO’s General Assemblies that meet in September.

While some progress was made in the discussion on limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives in the digital environment, and India became the first country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty, it was another disappointing end to the week.