Czech National Centre for Electronic Resources

The mission of the National Centre for Electronic Resources (hereinafter as CzechELib) is to improve the availability of electronic information resources for member institutions and thereby increase the efficiency of the research, development and innovation sector to align with developed countries that have been operating similar information resource centres for many years.
The CzechELib provides central procurement of key electronic resources for the entire research and education community in the Czech Republic, takes care of their management, including usage statistics, and supports open access publishing. The National Centre was established as a department of the National Library of Technology in 2017 with support from the ESIF European Structural and Investment Funds.
The CzechELib mainly provides the following activities for and on behalf of its participants:

• selection of the EIRs for central support,
• the implementation of public procurement,
• negotiation of licence agreements and the actual purchase of EIRs,
• support to member institutions in accessing and using the EIRs,
• support to member institutions for the elaboration of bibliometric analyses,
• managing and maintaining statistics on the use of resources,
• support to member institutions in negotiating the publishing part of the contracts (open access agenda).

The CzechELib is funded now by the project “National Centre for Information Support of Research, Development, and Innovation”, which receives support from the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. This project aims at increasing the efficiency of national R&D&I by building a new comprehensive platform, the 'One-Stop-Shop for Researchers (OSS4R)', which will provide information resource services and other advanced assisted and self-service support to academic institutions, individual researchers, and business entities.