On August 5–8, at Lund University Library (Sweden), took place the meetings of the XI EIFL General Assembly.
The interests of the Republic of Belarus in EIFL are represented by the Council of Libraries for Information Interaction at the National Library of Belarus (NLB). V.I. Brichkovsky, the Belarusian national coordinator, head of the Division for Information Support of Innovative Activity of the National Library of Belarus became an active participant in the XI General Assembly.
Representatives of more than 26 national library consortiums from developing and transitional countries took part in the Assembly.
The issue of free access to information resources was the dominant theme of the EIFL General Assembly-2010. The Оpen Аccess technology is an advanced field of scientific communications in the Internet age. The Оpen Аccess principles have been supported by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), Open Access Directory (OAD) and many others.
Many lectures paid a special attention to promotion of open access to electronic resources, development of institutional archives of scientific papers and dissertations, and open access journals. Representatives of different countries exchanged experience in the field of technical and legal issues of open access systems. The special session was dedicated to preparation of the Оpen Аccess Week which is takes place on October 18-24, 2010. The basic theme of the event is informing of researchers and educators on the open access principles, and holding of conferences, seminars and trainings.
The report on the Directory of open access journals (DOAJ) maintained by Lund University Library and at present includes more than 5 300 reviewed scientific journals aroused the audience’s interest.
During the sessions the problems of coordination of the activity of libraries and national consortia for information inequality elimination and providing of access to scientific and educative electronic information resources were discussed as well.
Also within the framework of the Assembly the meetings of national consortia with representatives of publishing houses and information agencies took place.
Representatives of many EIFL national consortia showed interest in the Belarusian methods of information support of innovative activity.
Note: EIFL (formerly eIFL.net) – is a non-profit organization providing aid and consultations on the use of electronic resources for libraries in developing and transitional countries.
At present EIFL houses library consortia of 48 developing and transitional countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia.
The main EIFL activities is development of national library consortia, promotion of exchange of knowledge on the global scale and development of the continuous education networks in the field of open access to publications, intellectual property right, open code software for libraries and creation of institutional repositories (archives) with a local context.
