JISC

Strategic aim one: to develop solutions that help enable the UK education and research communities to keep their activities world-class through the innovative use of ICT

To be met through: providing a first class sustainable infrastructure (network, middleware, widely available content and an information and communications environment)

• Network infrastructure
• Access management - authentication
• Content provision
• Information and communications environment

Network infrastructure

UKERNA supply JANET - the UK National Research and Education Network (NREN), on behalf of JISC.

JANET is a reasonably priced, high quality, dedicated network that is specifically designed to meet the current and future needs of the JISC community. The system of tender and procurement allows this network to be modified, adapted or expanded to  accommodate the changing requirements of the community and of technology.

It is problematical to compare JANET provision and costs accurately with other networks. Individual aspects of service provision may be compared with that of other providers, but no single provider offers a similar combination:

• Each JANET connection is via a dedicated line and there is no contention with other providers
• JANET includes a unique package of ancillary services including some that are not usually available from other providers.  This package includes extensive customer support, mail, security, videoconferencing and multicasting services, domain name registration, web services, usenet news and training

A JANET benchmarking exercise commissioned by UKERNA and provided by Teligen (internal document) compared the pricing structure of other main UK service providers with those of UKERNA. Although certain elements of network provision were available at a lower price in the UK, there was no evidence to suggest that the package of network services provided could be obtained at a lower cost with the same quality of service and flexibility.

JANET is a highly reliable network; that reliability has continued to improve.  A 0.1% rise in availability to an institution results in increased service of 8 hours 40 minutes per year, with consequential increases in productivity of individuals working at that site.  Figures comparing 2002-03 and 2004-05 (corrected to allow for the different numbers of institutions) suggest that some 230 institutions saw a rise in availability of at least 0.1% between those years. 

European benchmarking

JISC commissioned UKERNA to perform a benchmarking study compared JANET against other NRENs in Europe. The subsequent report, produced in October 2005, noted that:

• JANET is a world-class NREN.  JANET is seen internationally as a high-class and reliable network with high availability and good performance.
• JANET is a particularly large and pervasive NREN, connecting all research and tertiary education, and reaching increasingly into schools.
• JANET compares well, technically, with other European networks.
• UKERNA is considered to operated and developed JANET in a competent and trustworthy manner.
• JANET is seen to lack current leading-edge technology and is slower to innovate than certain other European research and education network providers. 
• Where UKERNA is involved in European activities or task groups, the contribution is welcomed and valued.

The JANET network provides a reliable, high quality, high-speed connection at a low cost per connection, compared with other European NRENs.

The base cost of JANET is high compared with other European NRENs.  Only the German network DFN had a higher basic transmission budget in 2005.  However JANET connects 730 institutions, more than double the connections provided by the DFN (299 connections).  

Using figures compiled by TERENA, JANET’s cost per institutional connection is not only lower than that for the major European NRENs but is well below the average. Of the EU-15 and EFTA countries, only two (Denmark and Finland) connect institutions for less. Their networks have a lower core capacity than JANET.

The French NREN RENATER appears to connect institutions at a lower per unit cost but their figure for number of connections is derived differently and is not directly comparable, as they include connections to sites rather than to institutions. This inflates the RENATER figure for number of connections.

UK benchmarking

No UK network provider offers the same range of network services as those provided by UKERNA.  An independent comparison of network prices of eight major suppliers in Autumn 2005 found that:

• UKERNA prices were within the ranges offered by of other major UK network providers for all but the higher speed provision. 
• Network costs fell between 2004 and 2005. The relationship between UKERNA and the other providers’ prices remained stable over the year.
• No network service provider supplied quality videoconferencing facilities as available from UKERNA.

The Office of Science and Technology (at the Department for Trade and Industry) reports acknowledge that UKERNA provides the sector with a good computer infrastructure.

The average cost of an institutional connection has fallen since 2002-2003.

Average network costs

Cost to JISC	2004-05	2003-04	2002-03
Per user – all UKERNA services	£2.75
Per user – basic transmission	£1.81
Per connection – all UKERNA services	£34,124.22	£35,759.49	£37,874.66
Per connection - basic transmission	£22,474.63	£26,177.60	£27,783.74

Security

The JANET Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) has particular responsibility for:

• Raising awareness about and advising the community on prevention of potential threats
• Assisting incident handling and remediation
• Assessing new threats with a view to developing methods of preventing incidents. 

The value of the CERT can be measured by community recognition of the importance of the work of the CERT; by resources saved due to the reduction of time taken handling incidents at institutions, and, importantly, by reducing the number of incidents through advice to the community.  This latter in particular is difficult to quantify.

Community perception

The JISC Monitoring Unit surveys of network infrastructure services regularly report that the user community perceive the JANET CERT as producing a valuable service, and that, in addition to assistance with incidents, it is very effective in providing literature and training.  However there is evidence that suggests that HEIs could do more to benefit from CERT advice thereby increasing the VFM arising from CERT activities.

CERT international benchmarking

The European benchmarking exercise noted that UKERNA are seen as being amongst the leading NRENs with regard to incident response and pro-active security measures.The work of the JANET CERT is highly respected at an international level.

Security incidents are not contained within national boundaries and international cooperation is imperative for any CERT.  UKERNA is recognised as successfully liaising with worldwide organisations and providing valued advice and support.

CERT national benchmarking

There are few commercial security services comparable to the CERT team and direct comparisons are complicated by the differing services offered.  In 2005 a contract with a UK security company who perform twice yearly audits including penetration tests, with an additional pay-per-incident charge was in the order of £3,000 pa for a London organisation of 2,500 users at three sites.  The rate for recovery assistance was £1,000 per day.  In 2004-05 the JANET CERT JISC budget was £622,377. 

Were savings-per-user extrapolated from the above, for the whole JANET customer base, a commercial CERT would cost the community over £11 million. However commercial rates are unlikely to be based on a flat rate for any number of users. It is more useful to compare costs on a per institution basis, which using the rate of £3,000 per annum, suggests that UKERNA CERT provision produces a possible saving of almost £1,800,000. The majority of institutions have more than 2,500 students and more than three sites so the final saving is probably higher. 

The comparative costs are as follows:

Average annual costs	JANET CERT	Commercial rate	Saving
Per institution	£1,213	£3,000.00	£1,787.00
Per user (up to 2,500)	£0.06	£1.20	£1.14
Recovery assistance	nil	£1,000.00	£1,000.00
All institutions	£622,377	£2,412,000	£1,789,623

These figures suggest that the commercial cost of JANET CERT is some three times higher than the current centrally provided service 

There were at least 110 known severe incidents during 2004-05 that resulted in institutions contacting the CERT for help.  Had each of them required two days of non-CERT recovery assistance to restore services this would have cost the community £220,000 at commercial rates.

CERT community savings

During 2005 the JANET CERT received 4,126 validated reports of incidents – an average of five per institution per year.  65 were denial of service attacks and 2,250 were malicious software (malware [1]). 

A single incident, where an institution’s home web page was replaced with one displaying abusive content was estimated to cost the host institution £8,200 (staff time taken to replace and restore the service and value of business lost whilst the main service was unavailable).  No sum was estimated to cover loss of reputation and bad publicity.

Using conservative estimates of time, cost and frequency:

• The JANET CERT receives reports of similar attacks at the rate of one a week.  If CERT advice prevents half the possible attacks, then over a year the value of that advice to the community is £426,400. 
• If CERT advice prevents half the Denial of Service attacks, (65 reported in 2005) and each denial of service attack costs the community a similar £8,200, then in 2005 the value of that advice to the community was £533,000
• If, in the event of a malware attack, CERT advice saves institutions half a person/day during restoration of service then in 2005 the value of that advice was £122,727. This calculation excludes loss of revenue caused to the institution from unavailability.
• If CERT advice prevented half the malware attacks in 2005, and the average time taken to patch and restore service was one person/day, then, the staff time saved equates to £245,454.  This calculation does not include loss of revenue caused to the institution by unavailability of computer services.

These four conservative scenarios amount to a value of  £1,327,582. For every £1 of funding for the JANET CERT in 2004-05 these calculations suggest the JANET CERT saved the community at least £2.13.

If the JANET CERT did not exist, similar commercial services would cost the community at least three times more than the current cost of the CERT.

 

 

 

 

JANET web hosting service

The JANET Web Hosting Service provides space on central web servers for JANET organisations to publish their websites.  The service can be used for production websites should institutions not have the resources to serve their own, and as a standby web site in case of institutional problems. The web hosting service is available to all organisations with a primary JANET connection. UKERNA makes a basic charge of £220 p.a. for up to 5Gb storage.

A competitive London-based web hosting service currently charges £250 for 1Gb.  The JANET service offers five times the capacity for a similar cost.

JISCmail

The National Academic Mailing List Service, JISCmail, is provided to facilitate knowledge sharing within the UK academic community, using email and the web, through the provision, support and development of specialist mailing list based services, enabling the delivery of high quality and relevant content. JISCmail supports topical discussion, wide collaboration and rapid communications, providing a means for the community to: 

Share experiences	Make and develop contacts
Enhance collaboration	Keep up to date with development
Keep in touch with peers	Announce events
Assist research	Access archived discussions
Store documents and images	Hold real time text-based discussions
Run surveys

JISCmail provides a safe environment, support for setting up and maintaining lists, and is free to the academic community.  JISCmail hosts over five thousand lists on a huge variety of subjects. Around 12 million messages are distributed to over a third of a million subscribers every month. The value of this service is apparent in the growing number of users, the sustained increase in volume of emails received and distributed, and the number of new lists created. 

JISCmail offers a commercial service Mailtalk to non-JISC subscribers.  This service charges £100 per annum for each list of 1-100 subscribers. Lists with 501 - 2000 subscribers cost £500 per annum. In July 2005 there were 5,202 active JISCmail lists.  If these all had 100 or fewer subscribers the cost to the community at this rate would be £520,200. UKERNA received £283,218 to fund the JISCmail service in 2004-05.    The estimated savings would be greater were lists with large numbers of subscribers factored into the calculation. 

However the above calculation indicates that for each £1 of JISCmail funding in 2004-05 the savings to the community were at least £1.84.

Mail abuse (Spam)

UKERNA subscribes to Mail Abuse Prevention Systems on behalf of all JANET customer organisations. The JANET mail relay team operate a Spam-relay tester, which assists institutions in testing their mailer and reports on any vulnerability found. Were JANET assistance and advice to reduce spam and, as a result of this, staff members save 1 minute a day, the annual saving of staff time for HE and FE staff would amount to a  £18,895,250 per annum. 

 

 

Customer service and enquiries

The provision of a customer service is a necessary part of the network provision.  The community perception of the JANET customer service helpdesk is positive – in a recent JISC Monitoring Unit survey 99% of the respondents rated its performance as satisfactory or above. The JANET Customer helpdesk generally receives between 400 to 600 requests per month. Presumably (respondents rated the responses as useful), Customer Service replies save some time and effort on behalf of the institutions making the initial queries. This is either time saved looking for an authoritative response to a query, or time saved by not purchasing/implementing inefficient solutions.  

Access Management – authentication

The JISC authentication service, Athens is an Access Management system that controls and provides access to web based services. Athens offers access to web-based services, and includes administration facilities for user institutions and resource providers.Athens is the largest system of its kind in the world, and is recognized as world-class for digital library access. 

The value to the community of the Athens service can be demonstrated by:

• The cost of the authentication service compared with that of other countries
• The high level of use of the authentication service by the community, including the integration of Athens authentication into cross searching  and the take up of the Athens single sign on and Athens DA service.
• The reliable environment provided which publishers recognise as a secure entry to their products
• Use of the Athens system or similar systems by other countries.

The development of an authentication and authorisation system was a necessary part of the strategy for providing commercial e-resources to the HE/FE community. However at the point of development there were few commercial alternatives, none of which were suitable for use for a wide range of products and across a wide community. Athens is still unique in the range of authentication and authorisation it performs for a tertiary education community. 

Benchmarking

International Authorisation and Authentication Infrastructures (AAI) for academic and research users are deployed worldwide.  These vary from simple password systems, to middleware designed to both authenticate the user and authorise, where appropriate, access to one or several resources. This range of functionality makes direct comparison difficult. 

TERENA publish basic information on NREN authentication activities and the 2005 TERENA Compendium notes that for many NRENS AAI is a new area.  The UK Academic and research AAI is run by Athens, rather than by the national NREN -UKERNA. As the TERENA Compendium analyses NREN activities, Athens was not included in the TERENA comparison.

Several European NRENS run some form of Authorisation system. Three were described as Shibboleth–based (Finland and Switzerland) or Shibboleth-compliant (Norway).  A further 14 countries operated a certification authority. No information was provided on the cost of these systems.

In 2003 the Swiss NREN SWITCH (SWITCH 2003) estimated that to implement an AAI for 300,000 users at 33 institutions would cost:

	SWITCH (Switzerland)			Athens
	2004	2005	2006	2004-05
Total cost	£388,836	£287,209	£220,930	£619,225
Per institution	£11,783	£8,703	£6,695	£1,207
Per (potential) user	£1.30	£0.96	£0.74	£0.06

The Swiss NREN, SWITCH, has implemented a Shibboleth compliant implementation at an estimated cost of £1.20 per user.  At the time of writing this is the only live Shibboleth federation. 

Athens authentication is used in over fifty countries. This includes use by ten academic organisations in Sweden, seven in Denmark, three in Norway and eleven in Ireland.

Service costs

There are currently an estimated 10,000,000 potential users on the network.  Of these 3,145,933 used Athens in 2004-05.  Despite increases in funding, the cost per user has fallen steadily from 31p per user in 2000 to 20p per user in 2004-05, mainly due to the economies of scale resulting from increasing number of users.

Athens costs in 2004-05 were:

Total grant	£619,225
Per institution	£1,207
Per (potential) user	£0.06
Per actual user	£0.20
Per authentication	£0.10

Content provision

Content provision concentrates on the acquisition of electronic resources and their delivery. Delivery may be via JISC service providers or directly from publishers.

In 2004-2005 the JISC Content services budget was £11.8 million, which was split between service provision and content acquisition.

JISC and HEFCE were the world leaders in terms of centralized content procurement strategy. In many countries each HEI or research institution brokers its own deals with publishers. Although a centralized brokering model is becoming more common, the UK model is unique in the scope and size of its user base and in the breadth and scale of the JISC provided content provision.  

In 2004-2005 the JISC provided access to some 60+ e-resources. Many of these require an institutional subscription to the service; some require no further financial input from institutions.  Some 40 resources are provided to the community at discounted subscription fees, made possible by JISC negotiated agreements.  Publishers are reluctant to have the extent of academic discounts revealed but the collections team has supplied figures for the following resources.  Not all the datasets in the JISC Collections portfolio are included.

DIGIMAP – Ordnance Survey	E-lawstudent
ISI Web of Science – Current Files	Grove Music Online
Education Image Gallery	Grove Art Online
Creative Club	SCRAN
Literature Online for Higher Education	Art Abstracts
Literature Colleges Edition	Art Full text
Know UK and Know Europe	Ovid Arts Package
Britannica Online

The agreements for these resources are calculated as saving at least £20,670,000 in 2005.  A further estimated £3,570,000 was saved from seven ‘heritage collections:

Institute of Physics Backfile	Digimap Historic Map Data
Royal Society of Chemistry Backfile	Web of Science Backfiles
Early English Books Online	OUP Journals Archive
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

In addition savings on NESLi agreements in 2005 were estimated at £1,870,000.  The annual cost of the NESLi2 Journal Negotiations was £255,000. 

For every £1 of JISC funding the saving from NESLi agreements was at least £7.33.

The total savings for all the above resources is £26,110,000.  The annual cost of negotiations in 2004 was therefore £982,500.  These figures suggest that the value of the E-Resource provision to the community is very high and that:

For every £1 the JISC spent on e-resources the saving to the community was at least £26.58.

The above calculations consider only 22 of the 40+ resources.Savings over the whole portfolio are likely to be greater.

The value of content provision to the community

The fundamental value of e-resources lies in their use by the community to support learning, teaching and research. The use of e-resources is now embedded in the work process, the resources are well used and there is evidence that e-resources are accessed more frequently than their paper equivalents. 

Value to the community is derived from:

• Time saved and made available for other activities e.g. research/teaching
• Increase in quality of research/teaching preparation, particularly from:
  • Greater scope of literature searches
  • Increase in use of primary information

  Athens and Monitoring Unit data suggests that there were over 15 million accesses to JISC supported E-Resources in 2004-05. When accesses via IP, and other non-Athens authentications, plus accesses to non-authenticated services are included the probability is that there were more than 20 million accesses or similar uses, during that year. 

  If nationally networked e-resources were not available the following alternatives would be used:

  • Paper based information at a nearby library
  • Static electronic resources such as CD ROMS at a nearby library
  • CD ROMS networked within an institution
  • Interlibrary loans
  • Visiting a distant library for casual (short-term) or extensive (long-term) research
  • Departmental or individual subscriptions to paper based information.

  Each of these has time, cost and efficiency implications not experienced with a networked electronic resource. HESA suggest that staff costs account for 58% of all expenditure in HE. Any development that reduces the time spent on routine staff activities will have a financial benefit.  Strouse, (2004) calculates that the increase of access to electronic resources has led to a steady decrease in the average hours researchers spend per week on information gathering and analysis. This has dropped from 9.9 hours per week in 2000 to 7.4 in 2004 – a time saving of 33%. This is a real productivity gain directly resulting from the successful management of information content. 

  HESA statistics for 2003-04 identify 117,870 university staff active in teaching and research. If each staff member saves 2 hours a week accessing bibliographic and other e-resources for 40 weeks each year, the saved time has a value to the community of over £137 million. 

  There are an additional 9,000 research staff working directly for Research Councils.  Assuming the same timesaving, the gains made by efficient use of E-Resources by these workers amount to a further £10,472,727. This brings the calculated saving to over £147,630 million.

  Value of time saved by JISC e-resources	E-resource budget 2004-05	Difference	Ratio
  £147,630,545	£8,620,000	£139,010,545	17.13

  These estimations concentrate on university research alone and do not include support staff, FE staff and students.  The saving is over twice that of the JISC core budget for 2004-05 (£63,546,712).

  The JISC Content services budget for re-resource provision was £8.62 million. 

                                                                                                                           

• The above scenario suggests that for each £1 spent by JISC on e-resource provision, the return to the community in value of time saved in information gathering is at least £17.13.

• An alternative evaluation

  In their report exploring efficiency gains through online content use (LISU 2005) it was estimated that the time saving accruing from electronic searching, compared with paper searches when converted to salary costs was valued at some £25.8m per annum in 2002.  This figure appears low.  However the LISU report did not include some high use resources and use of e-resources is increasing rapidly - in 2004-05 it was 35% higher than the previous year, a similar increase to that between 2002-2003 and 2003-2004.

  There were almost 21 million accesses to e-resources in 2004-05 [2]. The LISU study presumed that the average length of use of an electronic resource is 25 minutes.  However this equals the time-out value of several well-used resources. If the average user time is instead considered to be 10 minutes per access and if the average time taken for a user to make a manual search for papers is taken to be one hour, the difference is as follows:

  Resource accesses = 20,843,741  E-resource budget = £8.62 million

  2004-05	Manual	Electronic	Difference
  Search time (days)	2,604,343	434,057	2,170,286
  Staff search time [3] (days)	1,718,866	286,478	1,432,389
  Value of staff time	£187,512,655	£31,252,145	£156,260,509

  The added value, equivalent to more than 156 million pounds per year, suggests the community is gaining 1.4 million person/days, by using e-resources rather than paper-based information. 

  This scenario suggests that:

  For each £1 spent by JISC on e-resource provision, the return to the community in value of time saved in information gathering is at least in the order of £18. 

  No value has been estimated for the time saving for students (some 738,000 days in 2004-05).  It is important that the UK continues to offer attractive online resources compared with other countries to maintain the appeal of UK education to overseas students.

  To quote one AHDS user “- You saved me hours of work and many trips to different libraries that would probably have been fruitless. So thanks again!”

  These calculations examine a twelve-month period, in a climate of increasing use of e-resources. There was an estimated 35% increase in use of JISC provided e-resources between 2003-04 and 2004-05. A similar increase was recorded between 2002-03 and 2003-04 and is likely for the current year compared with 2004-05. All indications suggest that the use of e-resources will continue to increase strongly and that the value of these services to the community will increase within institutional budget constraints.

  Further costs of print versus digital access

  The true cost of print access is often underestimated. In addition to subscription costs, the costs of shelving, cataloguing, binding, archiving and staff time should be factored into the calculation. Detailed comparisons of cost of providing e-resources suggest e-resources cost less than paper, and that the relative cost of e-resources is falling.  In Brown (2003) wrote: "Storing and conserving our physical stock of records (which has now grown to 176 kilometres) cost £14.3 million in 2002”.  He continued “Retrieving a paper record for use by a reader costs about £6; delivering one over the internet cost 13p".

  JSTOR (who provide an increasingly well-used electronic archive of scholarly journals) estimates that the backfiles of the periodicals offered by them (assuming that a library has the full runs) fill approximately 7,000 linear metres.  Estimates vary for the cost of shelving in libraries, but figures of capital costs associated with housing these volumes is more than $725,000 in an American university library.  These costs will increase as more content is added.

  Were the costs in the UK similar for the 106 subscribing UK HE/FE institutions, this would represent an outlay of over £41,000,000 to house the equivalent paper copies covered by the JSTOR service.  A similar outlay would be needed to shelve current periodicals available through NESLI and similar deals, and the volumes of abstracts, which were an important part of every academic and research library. Clearly it would be unlikely that all universities would house these journals and the real value of the JSTOR service is in the instant accessibility of these articles for use across a wide section of the community. 

  In a survey by JSTOR, in 2003, of librarians in the USA, 33% of respondents reported that because of JSTOR, they had already stopped binding recent issues, and 23% indicated that they had moved bound volumes of titles included in JSTOR to remote storage.

  When considering the cost of digital provision the cost of local area networks, computers, computer rooms and technical support must be considered. In “Comparing Library Resource Allocations for the Paper and the Digital Library: An Exploratory Study” Connaway and Lawrence (2003) concluded that a digital library would require fewer resources in terms of space, labour, materials and equipment than in a paper library, but that the skills required to staff a digital library might be in shorter supply and therefore more expensive.
  

  Information and communications environment

  To be met through supporting the use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and the development of Managed Learning Environments (MLEs), identifying and defining technical standards and, with other organisations, helping to embed e-Learning and supporting emerging eLearning pedagogies. This activity is discussed under the third strategic aim – ‘To help the sector provide positive, personalised user learning experiences and aid student progression.’ - to be met through supporting research and in particular eScience,  and helping to embed eScience more widely across research

  UK Research quality

  Research UK reports that the UK produces 9% of the world’s scientific papers, and 13% of those most highly cited. UK research wins 10% of internationally recognised science prizes and has produced 44 Nobel Prize winners in the last 50 years. UK academics produce 16 research papers for every $1m invested compared with the 10 produced in the US and 4 in Japan.  The UK has 1% of the world’s population. 

  The ‘PSA Metrics Data Report’, commissioned by the Office of Science and Technology a report on the performance of the UK research base, demonstrated that in some areas the impact of UK research has surpassed that of the United States. According to the Research Councils UK this ‘represents a clear indication of the high impact of UK research, who together invest over £2.5 billion a year in research’ (Research Councils UK, 2006).

  Chatterji and Seaman (2004)  state in ‘RAE Results and Research Funding in the UK: A Regional Analysis’  ‘The economic benefits to British industry of a strong research base are difficult to calculate, but research is a fundamental requirement for the jobs of millions of British workers and supports British export efforts. For a range of industries from defence equipment (e.g. British Aerospace) to pharmaceuticals (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline) Britain has achieved a global presence far in excess of that which one might expect for a middle-ranking country.’

  Hicks and Katz, (1996) estimated that some 60% of papers published in the UK were generated by or including collaboration with the Higher Education sector, and that the amount of collaboration in the production of papers between disciplines, institutions and sectors was increasing.

  There is no doubt about the quality of UK research. This excellence has been maintained in an environment of global growth in research, a situation that would not have been possible without substantial investment in e-Resources. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s  paper  ‘Productivity in the UK: The Regional Dimension’ (2001) emphasised that the invention and application of new technologies, products and production processes is a key driver of productivity growth - accounting for around two thirds of UK economic growth in the past fifty years. 

  It is well nigh impossible to place even an approximate monetary value on the impact of the JISC contribution within UK research. Benefits arise from the provision of:

  • Network and ancillary facilities
  • e-resources
  • Communication resources – email, videoconferencing and discussion lists.
  • Open access self archiving resources
  • Advisory bodies

  A discussion of the saving of researchers time by the use of e-resources, and the value of that time is found in the content provision section of this document.

  The network infrastructure, content provision, advisory organisations, and discussion groups facilitated by the JISC make an important contribution to the development of a healthy research community.  JISC activities underpin and facilitate UK research, which in turn underpins much of the economic growth of the UK.  

  Back to contents

  [1] Malware is any program or file that is harmful to a computer user and includes computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and spyware, programs (gathering information about a computer user without permission).

  [2] Known accesses reported to the JISC Monitoring Unit plus accesses for other resources reported from Athens with an estimation representing IP authenticated accesses.

  [3] Athens data suggests that some two thirds of accesses are from staff.

• Reduction in production time for writing
• Decreased likelihood of unintentionally repeating research work
• Increased ease of keeping up with current research
• Increased efficiency for courses and students using e-resources. Several people (e.g. class groups) can access a single document simultaneously.
• Increase in quality by using electronic documents –several documents may be accessed for no extra cost – costs increase with each paper document.
• Increased efficiency as e-resources can always be found and accessed – there is no need for interlibrary loans, return of documents from other borrowers and no loss of documents.