Access
Knowledge is free. Research power is paid for.
Full consultation of the corpus stays free and requires no account, permanently. What follows opens up working capabilities, never access to the records themselves.
What the corpus opens up
One person, one team, one programme.
Open
For everyone.
Nothing here sits behind a paywall. Every person in the corpus has an entry: the family links that connect them, the evidence behind each one, the folio it was read from, and how certain each claim is, shown plainly. Browse the map, the timeline and the event entries freely, follow the path between two people, flag an error, cite a result with confidence. Open to everyone, no account, for good.
Always free, no account.
Research
The individual, self-service plan.
Research is the only self-service plan in the whole offer: an individual subscription, no negotiation, built for anyone working alone, a doctoral student, a professional genealogist, a project not yet attached to an institution. It opens up searches tolerant of historical spelling, cross filters (role, occupation, rite, source, event type, degree of certainty), side-by-side comparison of families or communities before and after a crisis, network and mobility analysis, saved searches, alerts and bounded exports.
Individual subscription: €19/month or €190/year. Reduced rate of €90/year for unfunded researchers; waivers on request.
Institutional
Shared infrastructure for a team.
A university does not pay to see a name; it pays to work faster, across a team, at scale. Institutional answers a different kind of need: infrastructure for a whole team, not one more individual seat. A university, a digital library or a digital-humanities lab gets federated authentication (SSO, Shibboleth, OpenAthens, IP ranges), shared spaces for a programme’s research, courses, seminars and dossiers, quota-based exports, account administration, usage statistics, year-on-year project retention, annual training and priority support. Founding-partner status is reserved for the first institutions on board.
Pricing depends on the institution’s category, from €3,000 to €10,000/year across three tiers (detail below).
| Tier | Institution type | Indicative price |
|---|---|---|
| Research Centre | Small centre or laboratory | €3,000/year |
| University | Typical-sized university | €6,500/year |
| Research University | Large research university | €10,000/year |
Going further
Three needs go further than what an Institutional licence already covers: technical scale, joint research investment, alliances across several institutions. These are extensions of the same collective need, not three separate families.
Data & API
Full access to the graph and its documented API, for a technical team that wants to integrate the corpus rather than browse it screen by screen.
Add-on of €5,000/year.
Institutional Partner
A research partnership, not one more subscription, to fund the extension of a corpus or build a shared thematic observatory.
€20,000/year.
Consortium
Shared governance across several universities, academies or research infrastructures, for a joint observatory of major historical crises.
€30,000/year for up to five institutions, then €4,000/year per additional institution.
Compare in detail
What is free, what is paid for
One grid for everyone, feature by feature. An empty cell marks a feature not included in that category. Pricing for each tier is shown above; this grid compares features only.
| Feature | Open | Research | Institution | Data & API |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search for a person | included | included | included | included |
| View lineages and evidence | included | included | included | included |
| Map and timeline | included | included | included | included |
| Simple path between two people | included | included | included | included |
| Advanced multi-criteria search | not included | included | included | included |
| Full network analysis | preview | included | included | included |
| Save projects | limited | included | included | included |
| Team collaboration | not included | not included | included | included |
| Small export | included | included | included | included |
| Large exports | not included | limited | quota | included |
| API | not included | small quota | option | included |
| Automated synchronisation | not included | not included | not included | included |
| Training and priority support | not included | not included | included | included |
| Bespoke development | not included | not included | option | partnership |
A need that does not fit any of these cells? Contact us
The source
Custodian
The corpus is open to everyone, free, with its evidence shown. A researcher gains an individual working tool; a university gains shared infrastructure. None of it would exist without those who agreed, at some point, to share their archives. Here, the circle closes.
Custodian is not a plan like the others. It speaks to diocesan archives, the Custody, parishes, congregations and memorial associations: to every institution holding the registers this corpus turns into a record. Without their holdings, without their trust in sharing them, there would be no Open, no Research, no Institutional.
In return, a holding institution gets its own archives back in hand: tools to oversee its collections, usage statistics, a backup and a structured way to retrieve its own data, public recognition of its contribution, and wider access in proportion to what it brings.
Access is free, or granted through reciprocity: registers, images, metadata, expertise, corrections, rights, funding or staff. What matters here is never an amount; it is what is given.
Free access, or access based on reciprocity.
Usage rights
Licences are non-exclusive and bounded: duration, users, purposes, volumes, all set out by contract. The database, the model, the code and any data already delivered remain the property of the producer. Consulting, extracting, redistributing, integrating: four separate uses, each governed on its own terms; a subscription alone never opens the door to republishing elsewhere. Frozen, documented and citable datasets stay available for anyone who needs to reproduce a publication.
Questions about access
Is consulting the corpus free?
Yes. Full consultation of Levantine Lives is free and requires no account: the 51,279 published records, their translations, their folio-level provenance and the 6,327 reconstructed people are all openly readable.
Where does the line run between free and paid features?
Searching for a person, lineages and their evidence, the map, the timeline and the simple relationship path between two people are free for every visitor. Advanced multi-criteria search, network analysis and project spaces require Research or above. Large exports, the API and automated synchronisation require Data & API.
What determines the price of an Institutional licence?
Price depends on the institution’s category. Three tiers: €3,000/year for a research centre, €6,500/year for a university, €10,000/year for a large research university. Data & API adds €5,000/year, Institutional Partner €20,000/year, Consortium €30,000/year for five institutions.
Is there a reduced rate for unfunded researchers?
Yes. The individual Research subscription offers a reduced rate of €90/year, or a waiver on request, for unfunded researchers. Institutions with more limited means can also request an adjustment, wherever they are located.
How does a university or laboratory become an institutional partner?
The Institutional Partner plan pairs a full licence and the API with a research partnership: cross-referencing the partner’s own data, funding a corpus-extension project, building a thematic observatory on a subject chosen together. It is set up on request, by contract, after a scientific meeting.
What is Custodian access and who qualifies?
Custodian is for the archives, Churches, parishes, congregations and communities holding the sources transcribed in Levantine Lives. Access there is free, or based on reciprocity, with full access to their own holdings and a structured hand-back of their data.
Other questions about the corpus, the sources and the method: see the full FAQ
Get in touch
A single point of entry for every request: individual subscription, institutional licence, API access, research partnership, consortium, or holdings to contribute to the corpus. The dedicated email address is not yet live. In the meantime, you can write by post to Levantine Lives, 54 rue Henri Barbusse, 92000 Nanterre, France.