Frequently Asked Questions

The Research4Life core offer includes two groups of countries, areas, or territories: Group A and Group B based on eligibility criteria.

Registered institutions in Group A countries can access Research4Life free of charge while institutions in Group B countries may access the Research4Life programmes for a small yearly fee.

Eligible institutions are: national universities, professional schools (medicine, agriculture, pharmacy, public health, engineering, etc.), research institutes, teaching hospitals and healthcare centers, government offices, national libraries, agricultural extension centers and local non-governmental organizations, located in an eligible country, area or territory.

The following categories of institutions are not eligible for Research4Life, even if the office is located in an eligible country, area or territory:

• International or regional organizations
• Member-based associations and societies
• Individual persons
• Commercial companies
• Any institution in a country, area or territory which is not eligible

Please note that even if you cannot register for our programmes, you can still access abstracts of all the journals for free and also full text from the Accessible Content tabs of the Portal:

• Hinari Accessible Content
• AGORA Accessible Content
• OARE Accessible Content
• ARDI Accessible Content
• GOALI Accessible Content

The programmes maintain lists of registered academic institutions.

Other eligible types of institutions may be registered, but are not listed publicly. If in doubt, please contact r4l@research4life.org.

Please visit our registration page and carefully read the instructions, especially those on the limits of length of some of the fields to fill, otherwise you will receive an error message from the website.

Please also note that Reserach4Life needs at least two contacts (of the director and librarian) to process the registration request.

Validation and processing of new registrations normally takes two to four weeks. It is essential that your institution completes all of the fields in the registration form with the requested information. Failure to complete all fields in the form will result in delays in processing your application.

Registration for one programme will grant access to all five.

Once the Research4Life team has processed your completed registration form, your director and librarian will be contacted and given detailed instructions on how to access and use the system.

All staff (researchers, teaching and administrative staff) and students of a registered institution are eligible to access the programmes, as long as they abide by the guidelines within the license agreement. On-site visitors may use the collections if a staff member logs in with their account.

Users need a computer connected to the internet. The Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI portals work with recent versions of the most standard web browsers. Users also need a recent version of Adobe Acrobat Reader to access journal articles in PDF. The Reader is available for free at www.adobe.com.

We have been working to improve access for users and to avoid the potential for password abuse. To do this, we collaborate with the IPRegistry (https://app.theipregistry.org/) to record IP addresses from our participating institutions and have begun automating this process. The automated lookup from the IPRegistry has now added for us the IP addresses of some of our institutions. This happened because the IPRegistry already had your institution IPs on file.

You should contact your library or your director if your institution doesn’t have a library.

When an institution registers, your library contact and the director of the institution will receive a welcome message with the ID and password.

In order for your institution to use its IPs to login to Research4Life without your username, we need you to register the fixed IPs in the IP registry. These IPs will be recognized by our authentication and you will not need to enter your user ID and password.

Please update your IP address list in the IP registry and inform us at r4l@research4life.org when the details are correct.

Please ask your institution’s IT group to add permission for the following domains:

• login.research4life.org
• sts.research4life.org
• stsr4l.who.int
• extranet.who.int
• www.research4life.org

It is likely that your cache has stored login details from a past session. To avoid the memory cache problem, we suggest you try logging into Research4Life using a private browser window. This will prevent the browser from saving login details, and you will be able to log in again later without any issues.

• In Firefox, right-click on the Menu icon, and then click on ‘New Private Window’.
• In Chrome, right-click on the Menu icon, and then click on ‘New Incognito Window’.
• In Internet Explorer, click on the Tools menu, and then click on the “InPrivate Browsing” option.
• Once in the private/incognito window, you can open a Research4Life session by connecting to login.research4life.org and selecting the programme you want to use.

The language choice on the login page is a preference for your web browser and only affects the authentication messages and errors. When you reach the content portal of the chosen Research4Life programme, you will still need to select the language of the portal.

In order to update your institutional details, we need to regain communication with the official contacts at your institution. Please contact us at r4l@research4life.org with complete information. We will need officials from your institution to request us to resend the ID and password to the new librarian and/or director.

Once you leave an institution, you are not eligible to use Research4Life with the access codes of that institution. If you join a new institution, contact the librarian or the director to know if your new institution has access to Research4Life. If not, the librarian or director can register for access.

Please inform Research4Life helpesk at r4l@research4life.org that you are leaving and provide us with the name and email address of the new contact person.

Content offered by publishers may vary depending on your location and type of institution. Check which content is available to you through:

•Hinari
•AGORA
•OARE
•ARDI
•GOALI

If you know the name of the journal that you wish to access after entering one of the programmes, go to “Find journals by title” and click on the letter that corresponds to the first letter of the journal name. This will bring you to a list of all journals that begin with that letter and that are offered through the relevant programme. Once you locate the title you are searching for, click again, and you will be directed to the journal’s homepage.

Detailed searching for articles by title, author or subject can be done through the search bar on the opening page of each programme portal.

Many journals offer access to back issues. However, the journal collections available, including the policy on back issues, is determined by each publisher and will vary accordingly.

If you can login but are unable to access a particular publisher, journal or book, please send an email at r4l@research4life.org with:

• your userID (in order to identify your country and your type of institution);
• the journal(s) books and/or resources concerned and publisher(s);
• the type of browser you are using.

Access to Research4Life is free for eligible institutions in Group A countries. The cost for eligible institutions in Group B countries is USD 1,500 per institution per calendar year (from January through December). This cost remains the same no matter which month during the calendar year you choose to pay. For instance, if you pay in April, you will have access from April to December of that calendar year.

Yes, one payment for Research4Life will grant access to all the programmes (Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI).

No. Payment is for a calendar year, from January 1 to December 31, and remains the same no matter when the payment is made. For example, if payment is made in April, then the full amount must be paid and access will continue only until 31 December of that year.

Yes. An individual or another organization may sponsor the payment. To do so, they should contact hinaripayment@who.int providing the name(s) of the institution and their username(s).

Several WHO Country Offices offer this facility. If you need additional information on your WHO Country Office, please contact hinaripayment@who.int.

If your institution has not paid the annual fee with Research4Life, it may interest you to know that some publishers allow access to their resources to all registered users in Research4Life in the countries where each publisher is offering. Please, find below the list of the available resources:

• Hinari
• AGORA
• OARE
• ARDI
• GOALI

Your institution can transfer USD 1,500 directly into the bank account provided in the invoice.

The free trial period lasts for six months. In order to continue receiving the full access relevant to your country, area or territory, you must submit payment prior to the end of the trial. Instructions concerning the payment will be sent to you at the beginning of the free trial. You may alert hinaripayment@who.int that a payment has been made to avoid loss of access at the end of the trial period.

You will find training and promotional material on the Research4Life website as well as on the respective websites of the programmes:

• Research4Life training portal
• Programme-specific training
• Research4Life promotional material

• For subscription-based journals, please contact us directly at r4l@research4life.org.
• For the open-access journal(s), Research4Life works with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
  Thus, we recommend that you apply for inclusion after checking whether your journal fulfills all of the criteria.
  If you have any questions about the application process, please contact DOAJ at feedback@doaj.org.
  Once listed in DOAJ, open-access journal titles from relevant subjects are exported from DOAJ into the relevant Research4Life content portals.

Yes, depending on subject and relevance review. Please contact us directly at r4l@research4life.org.

Yes, Research4Life includes thousands of online books. Please contact us directly at r4l@research4life.org.

Partners include the world’s leading scientific publishers, WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, ILO, Cornell and Yale University Libraries, STM and other technical partners: list of partners.

Research4Life extracts statistics from logins by user names. Statistics can be requested once a year by the institution.

Access to the collections may only be provided from computers or other digital installations owned by or under the direct control of the institution or from personal computers owned by the employees, faculty or students of the institution.

Academic and teaching staff may make copies in print or digital form of articles for coursepacks. If the copies are supplied in digital form, these electronic copies must be deleted from the university server at the end of the semester.

No. However, you may download and save limited numbers of articles or chapters from any journal issue or book if the selection does not exceed 15% of its contents. See the license.