Founded in 1999, EIFL began by advocating for affordable access to commercial e-journals for academic and research libraries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Their work has expanded to include other programmes that enable access to knowledge for education, learning, research and community development.

OSI through EIFL aimed to assist libraries and their users in achieving access to electronic scholarly resources.

EIFL acts as an agent for the national library consortia, who manages promotion and use of the electronic resources locally.

Libraries and their users have access to thousands of full-text academic and scholarly journals from the arts to zoology through EIFL licences.