# FRELIP — Free eLibrary Portal

> FRELIP is an open-access discovery platform born in Nigeria, dedicated to barrier-free access to scholarly and educational resources for students, educators, and researchers across Africa and the wider Global South. It aggregates open-access journals, books, and OER and exposes them through a discovery service, curated research guides, and a free learning platform — no subscription or login required.

## Mission and context

FRELIP (the Free eLibrary Portal) was born in Nigeria to close the knowledge gap faced by learners and researchers in emerging economies. It is built for low-bandwidth, intermittent-connectivity environments and is committed to open access (OA) and open educational resources (OER) as the route to equitable, barrier-free knowledge. FRELIP aggregates OA and OER from publishers, universities, and repositories around the world, organises them by discipline, and exposes them through free, no-login tools. Everything FRELIP offers is free to use: there are no subscription fees and no account is required to browse, search, or read.

FRELIP spans four public properties working together: a portal (frelip.org), a discovery service (search.frelip.org), a learning platform (learning.frelip.org), and research guides (guides.frelip.org).

## The FRELIP properties in depth

### frelip.org — the portal and Open Access Journal Feeds

The main portal is the front door to FRELIP. Its Open Access Journal Feeds harvest RSS/OPML feeds from open-access journals and present new articles organised by discipline. The feeds currently expose approximately 74,000 articles drawn from 275 open-access sources, spanning 9 disciplines. Each item carries bibliographic detail and links out to the full text on the publisher or repository. The portal is built on WordPress with RSS/OPML feed harvesting at its core.

- [Open Access Journal Feeds](https://frelip.org/feed_file/)
- [About FRELIP](https://frelip.org/about/)
- [Services](https://frelip.org/services/)
- [Support](https://frelip.org/support/)

### search.frelip.org — the Discovery Service

The Discovery Service is a unified, full-text search interface built on VuFind and Apache Solr. It indexes 160,000+ records spanning 9 disciplines, letting users search across open-access journals, books, and other scholarly materials from a single search box and follow links to full text. It is free and requires no login.

- [Discovery Service](https://search.frelip.org/)

### learning.frelip.org — the Learning Platform

The Learning Platform is a free Moodle instance offering 72 courses on open access, information literacy, research skills, and related topics. Courses are free and open; learners can study at their own pace. No subscription is required.

- [FRELIP Learning Platform](https://learning.frelip.org/)

### guides.frelip.org — Research Guides

The Research Guides are 15 curated, subject-based pathfinders built on SubjectsPlus. Each guide points to high-quality OA journals, OER, databases, and tools for a given discipline, helping users find and evaluate trustworthy resources.

- [Research Guides](https://guides.frelip.org/)

## Disciplines covered

FRELIP organises its journal feeds and discovery records across 18 top-level disciplines:

- Agriculture & Food Sciences
- Arts & Humanities
- Business & Economics
- Climate & Atmospheric Sciences
- Conservation & Biodiversity
- Education
- Engineering & Technology
- Environmental Management
- Environmental Sciences
- Law & Legal Studies
- Library & Information Science
- Life Sciences & Biology
- Mathematics & Statistics
- Medical & Health Sciences
- Multidisciplinary
- Physical Sciences
- Social Sciences
- Water Resources

## Technology

FRELIP is built entirely on open-source tools, chosen for resilience in low-resource, low-bandwidth settings:

- RSS and OPML — harvesting and display of scholarly journal feeds (frelip.org).
- VuFind + Apache Solr — the unified Discovery Service (search.frelip.org).
- Moodle — the free Learning Platform (learning.frelip.org).
- SubjectsPlus — the Research Guides (guides.frelip.org).

## Service status

Live and in active use: Open Access Journal Feeds (frelip.org), Discovery Service (search.frelip.org), Research Guides (guides.frelip.org), and the Learning Platform (learning.frelip.org). All four properties are free to use and require no login or subscription.

## The FRELIP properties

- [frelip.org](https://frelip.org/) · [search.frelip.org](https://search.frelip.org/) · [learning.frelip.org](https://learning.frelip.org/) · [guides.frelip.org](https://guides.frelip.org/)

## Reference

- [Sitemap](https://frelip.org/sitemap_index.xml)