Free access to Yale’s digital collections 

Millions of digitized objects from Yale’s libraries, archives, and museums are freely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. These resources can be accessed through LUX and the library’s Digital Collections.  

Support for open access initiatives 

As a university, Yale supports and contributes membership fees to numerous Open Access initiatives. 

Watch a video about how Yale University Library supports open access.  

Global access to Yale’s online learning opportunities 

Courses taught by Yale faculty members and other online learning opportunities are available to a global audience through the Yale Online initiative. An offerings catalogue provides a central listing of opportunities offered across the university, including many free programs. Yale courses and content have been accessed by users from all over the world, including those from conflict zones whose access to scholarly content and learning opportunities have been impacted. 

Research4Life 

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 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.  

Yale University supports the partnership in several different ways: 

• The Lillian Goldman Law Library provides metadata support and collection development expertise for the GOALI (Research for Global Justice) program. 

• The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides metadata support for the partnership, and collection development expertise in selecting materials for the HINARI (Research for Health) 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.