User Subscriptions

The RFI aims to be a financially sustainable initiative and not be dependent on any single major source of funding. While financial support at the start is needed to kickstart the RFI, over time the goal is for subscriptions to fund basic operations – specifically: RFI certification, basic management of the RFI, and global RFI governance.

In addition to this basic funding, we will look for opportunities that will allow us to also provide other value-added services and upgrades to the system.

We anticipate that 350-500 active users are needed for the RFI to reach financial sustainability at the basic level – and we expect to reach this level within 5 years.

The RFI team has consulted widely on a fair way of distributing fee-based revenue while still being able to provide an excellent service – and the following is the result:

These subscription fees are based on:

1. Requirements to maintain a minimal RFI infrastructure that can deliver the basic services – as administered through a non-profit organisation.
2. Absolute affordability for any organisation engaged in global research partnerships, anywhere in the world that wishes to become and remain an RFI Reporting Organisation as part of its strategic plan.

As a result, the RFI Subscription Fees are based on organisational budget , for-profit or non-profit character (as for-profit organisations can include these costs as part of marketing and/or social responsibility expenditure), and World Bank classification of national budgets for government departments wishing to produce or use the RFI Report.

The RFI team is open to innovative ways of paying for RFI Subscriptions, such as:

• Including subscription fees as part of research grants
• 3^rd party support to pay for subscription fees
• or any other proposal that will make it possible to become an RFI Reporting Organisation while, at the same time, ensuring financial viability of the RFI System

All resources placed on the public RFI website are freely available at this time.

However, official certification of RFI Reports, use of the RFI Logo and listing as an official RFI Reporting Organisation on the RFI Web are available only to RFI subscribers.

An easy, online payment system will be available soon.

In the meantime, the following payment options are available in USD:

• Electronic Bank Transfer: Please contact Monica Gazzetta at gazzetta@cohred.org for bank transfers
• Cheque: Please make cheques payable to COHRED and send them to COHRED, P.O.Box 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland