Participating in LIBER comes with many benefits. One of these is the opportunity to contribute to DART-Europe: an e-theses portal through which libraries can raise the visibility of their work and research by publishing Open Access metadata records and research theses. In the following article, we explain in more detail what DART-Europe is and what…
On 19 February former LIBER President Paul Ayris attended, at the request of current LIBER President Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, a high-level meeting with European Commissioner Oettinger in Brussels on copyright reform — arguing the case of a mandatory pan-European Exception for Text and Data Mining, which could not be overridden by contracts. The text of Dr Ayris’s…
On 29 August, the National Library of Latvia — home of the LIBER 2014 Annual Conference — was officially opened. An impressive list of VIP guests formally addressed the Opening Ceremony in the Concert Hall. They included the President of the Republic of Latvia, Mr Andris Bērziņš; Her Royal Highness Princess Petra Laurentien of the Netherlands, Princess of…
On 16 July 2014, LIBER sent its new Adviser on EU matters and Horizon 2020 to Brussels. In making the trip, I represented both LIBER and LERU (League of European Research Universities). A busy day saw visits to three Directorates General – DG Connect, DG Research and DG Enterprise & Industry. A principal topic of…
Dr. Paul Ayris, President of LIBER, reports on our recent Digital Curation Workshop in Vienna, Austria. LIBER held its 3rd Digital Curation Workshop in the University of Vienna on 19-20 May 2014, with 97 registered delegates. This Workshop was organised under the aegis of LIBER’s new Forum on Digital Cultural Heritage. The Programme can be…
The final conference of the MedOANet project took place in Athens on 17-18 October 2013. As President of LIBER, I was invited to be a member of a roundtable panel on the second day of the conference, and to give the summing up at the end of the event. MedOANet is an EU-funded project and…
On September 6th, the DART-Europe Board met in Senate House Library at the University of London. The DART-Europe portal makes available Open Access research theses from the libraries of LIBER members. As of today, there are 416,113 open access research theses from 541 Universities in 27 European countries available through the portal. The 2013 DART…
14 December 2012 sees the launch of two statements from the League of European Research Universities on Open Access and Open Data – see http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/news/leru-launches-statements-on-open-access/. The 1-leaf fliers are concise statements, signed off by the LERU Rectors in their recent Assembly, which state the views of all LERU Universities on the importance of Open Access…
This Blog posting of LIBER President is an overview of a paper given at the 41st LIBER Annual Conference in Tartu, Estonia, in June 2012 1. The Problem What is the problem that this paper is trying to solve? Louise Adler, Chief Executive of Melbourne University Press, has summed up the position of monograph…
LIBER was represented at a Breakfast meeting on 10 October 2012 with MEPs in the European Parliament to talk about Open Data. On 10 October 2012, the President of LIBER was invited to address MEPs in the European Parliament, as one of five panel speakers on the issue of Open Data. The Parliament, Commission and…
At http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/23/finch-report-open-access-research, the Guardian newspaper has published an article showing how UCL (University College London) is assessing current developments in Open Access, concluding that the Gold route brings a number of challenges for Europe's research-intensive universities.
Today Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, has issued a strong statement backing Open Access to research outputs funded by the European taxpayer. Following in the steps of the Finch Report in the UK, the new statement on Open Access policy from Research Councils UK (RCUK), and the UK’s Royal Society Report on…
