The FRELIP community is a volunteer network of librarians, researchers, educators and technologists who keep open knowledge free and findable across emerging economies. There is no membership fee and no application process. You join by doing one thing — suggesting a repository, translating a lesson, contributing a journal feed, or teaching a class — and you can start today.
Why FRELIP needs a community, not an audience
Most of the world’s research is now open access, but “open” is not the same as “reachable.” A thesis sitting in a university repository in Kumasi or Kampala is technically free to anyone — and effectively invisible to almost everyone. Search engines under-index it. Aggregators skip it. Students never learn it exists.
Closing that gap is not a technical problem we can solve once and walk away from. It is maintenance work, and it is local knowledge work. Someone has to know that a particular journal changed its feed URL. Someone has to know which Portuguese term a Mozambican student would actually search for. Someone has to notice when a repository goes dark. That is what the people below do, and it is why FRELIP is built by volunteers rather than bought as a product.
Four ways to contribute
Each pathway below is independent. Pick the one that matches what you already know — none of them require you to learn the others.
1. Suggest a repository or journal
If you know of an open-access journal, an institutional repository, or a thesis collection that FRELIP does not yet index, tell us. This is the single highest-impact thing a newcomer can do, and it takes about two minutes. We especially want sources from African, South Asian and Latin American institutions, which are the most consistently under-represented in the large commercial aggregators.
You do not need to know whether the source is technically compatible — send us the URL and we will work that out. Send us a source →
2. Translate a lesson
FRELIP publishes in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Our course material and research guides are translated by volunteers who are subject-literate, not just bilingual — a research-methods lesson translated by someone who has never taught research methods tends to read like a dictionary. If you teach, research, or work in a library and you are fluent in one of our four languages, you can help.
Translation happens lesson by lesson. There is no minimum commitment, and you keep authorship credit on everything you touch.
3. Teach, or learn in public
Our learning platform hosts free, open courses in information literacy, open-access publishing and research impact. Volunteers write lessons, review them for accuracy, and answer questions from learners. If you would rather learn than teach, that is a contribution too — the questions learners ask are how we find out which lessons are unclear.
4. Build and maintain
FRELIP runs on open-source infrastructure — a discovery layer, a feed aggregator, a research-guides platform and a learning management system, all maintained by a small group of technologists. If you write code, administer library systems, or work with metadata standards such as OAI-PMH, Dublin Core or schema.org, there is unglamorous and genuinely useful work here.
What you can expect from us
Volunteering with a small project can be a good way to have your time wasted, so it is worth being explicit about the terms. We commit to the following:
- You keep credit. Contributors are named on the work they produce and listed on our team page if they want to be.
- Your work stays open. Everything FRELIP publishes is openly licensed. Nothing you contribute will end up behind a paywall.
- We reply. If you write to us, you will hear back from a person, normally within a week.
- No manufactured urgency. We will not chase you, guilt you, or set deadlines you did not agree to. Contribute at whatever pace your actual job allows.
The people already doing this
FRELIP is maintained by volunteer librarians, editors and technologists working across several countries. You can read who they are, what they work on, and how to reach them.
Get in touch
Tell us which of the four pathways interests you, and roughly how much time you have. A single sentence is enough — we do not need a CV or a cover letter.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be a librarian?
No. Roughly half of our contributors are researchers, teachers, students or developers. What matters is that you know something specific — a discipline, a language, a country’s research landscape, or a piece of software.
Is there a minimum time commitment?
None. Suggesting one repository is a real contribution and we treat it as one. Some volunteers do a single thing once; others translate a course over six months.
Is FRELIP a charity, and is any of this paid?
FRELIP is a volunteer-run open-access project. Contribution is unpaid, including for the people who founded it. We would rather say this plainly than let anyone discover it later.
What happens after I write to you?
A member of the team replies, usually within a week, and points you at a concrete first task. There is no interview.