Company History

The national consortium of Russian libraries, NEICON was created and juridically registered in 2002 in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation. The NEICON founders are the largest libraries of Russia - the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia and the All-Russian State Library of Foreign Literature named after M. I. Rudomino.

Initially, the number of NEICON members was about a hundred organizations. Over the years of the company’s existence, this figure has increased by ten times and today NEICON is the largest Russian library consortium and one of the largest library consortia in the world.

As of the beginning of 2018, NEICON members count more than 1060 organizations in all Federal Districts and regions of the Russian Federation. More than half of all participants are organizations of the Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations (FASO), departmental and Federal research institutes and research centers. Russian universities including all Federal universities, National research universities and the 5-100 project universities make more than 40%. The share of public libraries is about 8%.

The main activity of NEICON as a library consortium has been and remains the information support of its member organizations to advance the level of Russian science and education and increase the research efficiency.
In 2002-2005, thanks to the NEICON initiatives and with the active assistance of NEICON members, the entire system of information support for science and education in Russia, the general principles of its functioning and the resource content formation were developed and successfully implemented.

Since the end of 2005,  the NEICON activity has developed in two main areas: traditional subscription to electronic information at the expense of the budgets of the organizations themselves and the implementation of state-funded subscription projects at the expense of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations.
In 2005-2013, with the direct participation of NEICON (see the list of state contracts in the NEICON Projects section), a system of Russian national and consortium subscription with the state funding under the Federal Target Programs (FTP) was formed.

Since 2014, projects of a consortium subscription to databases of scientific electronic resources and a national subscription to global citation indexes have been successfully implemented within the framework of the projects of the State Public Scientific and Technical Library of Russia. The national subscription to the full-text databases of the two largest publishers Springer-Nature and Elsevier is carried out by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.

Since 2014, the NEICON structure comprises units that support Russian scientific journals and implement the Open Access and Open science projects.