On August 31, we reached the soft-close of the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Call for Support.

First and foremost, we want to thank everyone who has reached out with offers – large and small – and to all who shared our call across their networks. We’ve received some very promising proposals, and we’ll be reviewing these in detail over the coming weeks.

As we review these offers, we want to be clear about what will guide our decisions. Over the past month, the BHL community has agreed on a set of Guiding Principles for the Transition (2025–2026). These principles reflect our shared values and priorities, and will guide our decision-making as we shape BHL’s future:

• We are committed to open access and open infrastructure to ensure biodiversity knowledge is freely available, reusable, and sustainable.
• We are a community-led, openly governed global consortium, building capacity that is resilient to institutional change and funding cycles.

• We deliver inclusive collections and equitable services that advance open science, while respecting legal, cultural, and conservation considerations.

• We are committed to modernizing our infrastructure to create a flexible, secure, and sustainable platform – prioritizing accessibility and global participation through multilingual, mobile-responsive design and equitable access.

• We surface and structure the data in biodiversity literature, in alignment with FAIR principles, enabling its discovery, reuse, and integration across the biodiversity research ecosystem.

• We connect past, present, and future by transforming BHL’s 63 million pages of biodiversity literature – the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity – into an indispensable open resource for research, conservation, and education worldwide.

We are profoundly grateful to everyone who has stepped forward to help ensure that BHL remains open and accessible to all.

We are also grateful to those who reached out with tentative support and early-stage ideas, as well as to those who let us know that, while they aren’t in a position to help right now, they’re working towards being able to in the near future. Every expression of interest matters.

The door remains open: we will continue to accept offers of support in the months ahead. If you have ideas, resources, or connections that could help sustain BHL, we would love to hear from you.

Securing BHL’s Future

The commitments we’ve received so far will provide BHL with critical interim stability for the next 1-3 years. This is a vital first step, but it’s only the beginning. To truly secure BHL’s long-term future, we will need sustained investment, new partners willing to share responsibility for hosting and governance, and continued creativity in how we fund and govern BHL. Building this stable foundation will be at the heart of our transition work over the year ahead.

Alongside the offers of hosting and funding, we have also been showered with outpourings of love and appreciation for BHL. Our favourite came via Bluesky, from Sarah Burke Cahalan, who wrote:

What Comes Next

Looking ahead, the coming year will be focused on building a sustainable governance and funding model that can safeguard BHL for decades to come. Alongside this, we are actively pursuing new grant opportunities to help secure this foundation.

And finally, we are excited to share that we are in the final stages of launching our public fundraising campaign. This will be an invaluable opportunity for our global community of BHL users to directly support BHL’s future. From now on, BHL will increasingly rely on fundraising and donations, and we will be deeply grateful for your support. We’ll be sharing more details very soon – watch this space!

The Call for Support was just the beginning. BHL now has promising next steps in place, but our transition journey is far from over. With your continued support, we can ensure that the world’s largest open-access library of biodiversity knowledge remains openly accessible for everyone, everywhere.