JISC

JISC aims to provide a voice for universities and colleges technical needs and aspirations. We work with business to ensure that current and future needs of UK post 16 education and research are met as effectively as possible through their product and service offering.

How we work with business

© Photo by Ben Charlton

We work with commercial companies and suppliers in a wide range of activities. Some examples include:

We can provide information about institutional and user requirements at a national level. JISC Collections actively engage and consult with librarians and members of advisory groups to identify content that will add value to their collections. They negotiate licence agreements with publishers on behalf of the UK’s education institutions.

We help business to broker relationships with UK colleges and universities and provide opportunities to work with UK colleges and universities through JISC-funded projects.

• 22 out of 34 projects involved commercial suppliers as project partners in our Flexible Services Delivery programme. These companies ranged from SMEs to major international corporations.
• Our Open Educational Resources programme has brought suppliers and institutions together to make existing learning resources freely available online. For example, Bristol University worked with a commercial publishing company to provide medical students with online access to images explaining the basic pathology behind a CT head scan.

Our experts collaborate with business on the development of technical and information standards, on a one to one basis and through forums such as Intellect, Gartner, the Open Group and the IMS. Examples include:

• The recent work on the business case for Open Standards by CETIS
• The continued development of Shibboleth access management technology and supporting documentation. This open source technology was adopted nationally by the UK’s educational institutions to enable users to securely access online content with just one username and password.

Our services often work with suppliers to provide key services to educational institutions. The best known example of this is JANET, the UK’s education and research network. More information on how to work with JANET as a supplier is available here.

We provide access to a range of events such as the Developer Happiness Days and publications on specific areas of emerging or innovative technology of interest to UK colleges and universities.

Guidelines on engagement with JISC

While JISC is keen to work with suppliers, we need to maintain JISC’s neutrality, expertise and balance. As JISC is funded by public money and because we wish to remain independent, there are certain activities and arrangements that we do not offer to companies:

Deals: With the exception of JISC Collections, JISC is not able to enter into any negotiations with the specific intent of creating ‘exclusive’ deals that individual companies can then market onwards to further, higher education and research.

Endorsements: Whilst we are always interested in hearing about new supplier services or offerings, JISC does not provide validation to a commercial organisation or their associated products and services.

Commercial benefit: A commercial organisation may not make commercial gain, from activities, products, development or services, which were wholly or partly funded by JISC. Ongoing development of a product using the commercial organisation’s own resources is exempt from this consideration.

Exclusivity: Our engagement with business should not enable or assist the commercial organisation to establish a monopoly position in a market.

Project funding: Whilst we are keen to involve suppliers in JISC funded projects they must submit bids in partnership with a UK university or college.

Contact us

If you want to discuss how you could participate in any of our current activities or have ideas for new activity that fit with the aims, offerings and restrictions outlined above then please contact John Wallace, Industry Liaison Manager.