CzechELib project history

The mission of CzechELib project is to create higher quality conditions for access to electronic information resources (EIRs) for member institutions, increase the efficiency of the research, development and education areas and at the same time to stand side by side with other developed countries that successfully run similar national license centres.

The project’s objective is to create and open a national centre CzechELib, which will effectively secure central purchase of key EIRs for research and educational realm in Czech Republic, it will manage these resources and it will statistically evaluate their actual usage by target group. Thanks to centralization of know-how, negotiations, purchases and resources management the amount of administrative burden for member institutions will be noticeably smaller and a stronger negotiating position towards the EIR provider will be created.

The centre secures especially following activities for its members:

• EIR selection for central support
• Realisations of tenders for EIR providers
• Arrangement of license contracts and the EIR purchase
• Support during enabling and usage of already purchased EIRs for member institutions
• Support for processing of bibliometric analyses for member institutions
• Management and supervision of resources usage statistics

The project was started on 1st of January 2017, finalisation of the project is planned for 31st December 2022. The National Library of Technology has become the implementer of the project, and the CzechELib centre has become one of its departments.

The highest authority of the CzechELib is the Managerial board, whose members are not only representatives from MEYS and NTK but also nominated representatives of key EIR users – AS CR, CRC and CHEI. The main project manager and his team are responsible for proper governance of the project. On the technical side the project is led by the director of CzechELib, who has an advisory body at his disposal – the Technical board – which consists mostly of experienced experts: current and former chiefs of different consortia in projects for Research and Development and for Innovation OP or LR programme.

Parameters of the project

Name of the project: National centre for electronic information resources
Abbreviated name of the project: CzechELib
Individual system project Operational Programme: Research, Development and Education
Priority axis 1: Strengthening the capacities for quality research
Project number: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_040/0003542
Realizer: National Library of Technology
Allocated in total: 1 056 082 843,81 CZK

Over 90 % of the total budget of the project will be used for support of electronic information resources purchase.

In years 2018 - 2020 EIR purchase will be supported from the project funding, for years 2021-22 it is assumed that full purchase support from state budget will be renewed, which is now is being discussed with the Research, Development and Innovation Council.

In a period 2018 – 2022 will be a support minimum 50 % of the whole price for EIR. The bibliometric database Web of Science and Scopus (with analytic tools InCites and SciVal) have minimum 70 % support.