General Assembly 2025

Submitted by Edvaldas_B on Fri, 2025-10-10 17:38

The EIFL General Assembly (GA) 2025 took place in Yerevan, Armenia, from 30 September - 2 October 2025, bringing together delegates from our network of library consortia in 30 countries, representatives of our partners in the publishing industry, invited speakers and members of the EIFL management board and staff team.

Over three days participants took part in interactive sessions with expert guest speakers, collaborated and built links with one another, identified the most pressing needs in their consortia, and shared ideas about how to address these needs.

In an opening address, Mr Alfred Kocharyan, Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia, welcomed cooperation with EIFL and stressed the importance of international collaboration in fostering progress in the fields of science and education. His address was followed by warm welcomes to delegates by Dr Anna Chulyan, Director of the National Library of Armenia, where the GA took place, and Emilija Banionyte, Chair of the EIFL Management Board.

Rima Kupryte, EIFL Director and EIFL programme managers shared highlights of EIFL’s achievements and activities over the past year. Time was also allocated for delegates from EIFL’s international network of partner library consortia to share their highlights of the past year and to talk about challenges they are facing.

Open access, open science and research assessment reform were a strong focus of presentations and discussions. Speakers from Armenia gave presentations on open access journals, repositories and open science policies in Armenia. And speakers from France and the Netherlands provided examples of successful implementation of open science and research assessment reforms in their countries.

Representatives of EIFL’s library consortia partners from Nepal, Serbia and Tanzania joined a panel on national and institutional approaches to Diamond open access (OA) publishing and tools to support the quality and sustainability of Diamond OA journals. Another panel discussion, on PIDs (Persistent Identifiers - long-lasting references to a digital file or set of files used to build stable connections between researchers, research outputs and organizations) featured EIFL coordinators from Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe, who shared experiences of DOI and ORCHID implementations strategies. EIFL presented plans for launching a ROR IDs campaign to encourage organizations to obtain or update their ROR records (ROR IDs are digital, open, unique and persistent identifiers for research organizations provided by the Research Organization Registry).

Delegates also had the opportunity to take part in individual discussions with EIFL partner publishers and programme managers during intensive 'speed dating' sessions.