Yale University Library is a founding partner of Research4Life, a public-private partnership of the World Health Organization; Food and Agriculture Organization; United Nations Environment Programme; World Intellectual Property Organization; International Labour Organization; Cornell and Yale Universities; the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers; and more than 200 international publishers. Research4Life’s goal is to reduce the knowledge gap between high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries by providing affordable access to scholarly, professional and research information.

Research4Life is the collective name of five programs—Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI—that provide developing countries with free or low-cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online in the disciplines of medicine, agriculture, environment, technology, and law. Researchers at more than 8,000 eligible institutions in more than 100 countries benefit from online access to up to 69,000 peer-reviewed international scholarly and professional journals, books, and databases, and full-text articles that can be downloaded for saving, printing or reading on screen.  Users can search by keyword, subject, author or language; access resources in several languages; and take advantage of information-literacy training and capacity development.

The Yale University supports the partnership in several different ways:

• The Lillian Goldman Law Library provides metadata support and collection development expertise for the GOALI program.
• The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides metadata support for the partnership, and collection development expertise in selecting materials for the HINARI program. In 2015, the HINARI program received the Medical Library Association’s Louise Darling Medal for Collection Development in the Health Sciences.
• Yale librarians serve on several Research4Life working groups and the Executive Council.

For more on the impact of Research4Life, please see the Voices page.