22 October 2020  Issue No: 288

The Lithuania-based Electronic Information for Libraries, which aims to enable digital information access in developing country libraries, negotiated article processing charge waivers for 34 partner countries that will be valid until December 2022.

The Ethiopian government is preparing to reopen the country’s 45 public universities as it ends a COVID-19 lockdown that began in March, despite the disease continuing to expand nationwide, along with growing concerns about social discord and violence.

In their magisterial book The New Latin America, Fernando Calderon and Manuel Castells undertake an ambitious intellectual task by attempting to portray the main changes that Latin America has gone through during the last few decades. The book combines social theory with impressive empirical data.

UNESCO ranks the University of Al Quaraouiyine of Fez in Morocco, which was founded in 859 CE, as the oldest in the world on the grounds that it continues to operate until the present day. Yet, also in North Africa in what used to be known as Numidia, there are to be found the ruins of an even older university.

On 28 October, University World News, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, will be bringing together experts from new and traditional higher education providers, the tech industry and the World Bank for a webinar on: “What will employability mean in the digital age and how should higher education adapt?”

Research agendas are now often shaped in the global network, not national systems. Although the United States retains a long lead in the number of high-citation papers, research power has become more diversified, with China and East Asia, India, Iran, Brazil and others becoming stronger.

Virtual learning – especially simulations and gamification – offers a way to take experiential learning from the margins of university education and fully integrate it into conceptual learning, creating an essential element in universities’ real world and work- or career-focused education, as well as lifelong education.

As Universities UK releases a report on addressing growing threats to security and academic freedom in the wake of rising interference by authoritarian regimes in international higher education, university leaders should adopt a proposed model code of conduct for protecting their staff and students.

How to strengthen the global communications network of student affairs in higher education was the topic of a virtual meeting of the International Association of Student Affairs and Services that brought together 21 national and international associations from across the globe and 50 of their leaders. The meeting launched a communications network to boost information flow worldwide.