Denise Nicholson
Profile
BA H DipLibr (UNISA); LLM (WITS)
Denise has 22 years’ copyright experience and is currently the Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is well-recognised locally and abroad for the positive role she has played in promoting access to knowledge, open access and copyright awareness.
Since 2002, she has served a number of terms on IFLA’s Advisory Committee on Copyright & Other Legal Matters, and is currently an expert advisor to this Committee. She worked on its Workgroup for a Treaty for Libraries & Archives (2007-2015) and is currently on its e-Lending Workgroup. In June 2019, she represented IFLA at the WIPO Regional Copyright Meeting in Kenya. She represented SA on the Electronic Information for Libraries Network (2005-2010), and contributed to its Model Copyright Law. She has been involved in various international, regional and local copyright and open access projects.
She is the copyright resource person for LIASA, the National Council for Library and Information Services and the Legal Deposit Committee. She was a member of the SA National Council for the Blind’s Copyright Alliance (2009-2014), and lobbied strongly for a Treaty for the Blind, and appropriate exceptions in our copyright law.
For many years she has been lobbying for change in our Copyright law. She made a number of submissions on the current Copyright Amendment Bill. She presented on behalf of the library and educational sectors at the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry’s public hearings in Parliament in August 2017.
She has received a number of prestigious awards for her work and professional contribution in South Africa and further afield. She is an author with many publications and has presented at many conferences globally. She has also given input into many international and local documents and policies relating to copyright and open access.