Update on ISI and the UK HE community

Important Announcement for all UKHE students, staff, libraries, and information services

New Information Service

The ISI service, which is currently hosted by BIDS at the University of Bath is the most successful and longest running of the subscription data services offered by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc). ISI is used extensively throughout the UK Higher Education community in both research and teaching. The service has been operational for eight years and the current contract expires in March 2000. CHEST has negotiated renewal of the contract with ISI, on behalf of Jisc, resulting in an offer for ISI's new "Web of Science" service.

Following extensive consultation with the user community, and fully considering the implications of moving from the ISI service to the new ISI Web of Science service, Jisc agreed that Web of Science should replace the current ISI service.

The Web of Science is ISI's new interface that provides Web access to the Science Citation Index ExpandedTM, Social Sciences Citation Index®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index® (formerly SciSearch, Social SciSearch, and Arts & Humanities Search). It will also provide access to ISTP® (Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings). This is the same data provided under the current ISI agreement. JCR® (Journal Citation Report) has been confirmed as an additional option for Web of Science, and discussions are continuing about Reaction CenterTM (part of the ISI Chemistry ServerSM) and Derwent Innovations IndexSM.

The new service will be available to all Higher Education Institutions funded by HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW and DENI together with a number of additional sites from the CHEST list. In accordance with Jisc's agreed policy on banded charging for datasets, UK HEIs have been divided into three categories for this service. These bands are based on those used for the JSTOR service, with the small and very small HEIs combined into a single group. All other sites on the CHEST list at http://www.chest.ac.uk/chestsites.html will be treated as large for the purpose of this service.

The subscription costs for the Web of Science service will be as advertised in Jisc Circular 16/98 which was sent to all UKHEIs in October 1998. The subscription price of the current BIDS ISI service has to date been subsidised by the Jisc by approximately £1,500 per site per annum. The subscription price of the new Web of Science Service in 2000/01 has been set at the same level as the existing service although Large sites will see an increase of £1,500 because the subsidy will disappear. Medium and Small sites will see immediate savings of £1,500 and £4,500 respectively. The increase in costs and loss of subsidy has been phased to lessen the impact on institutions. The Web of Science service will also be available to Further Education institutions but the subscription prices have not yet been determined.

New Service Provider

As ISI Web of Science is a completely new information service requiring a different hardware platform and different support from the service provider serving the information to UK higher education institutions, Jisc followed its normal policy of going to tender for service provision. The successful bid came from MIDAS at Manchester Computing, University of Manchester who will host the ISI Web of Science service. The service will be provided by a close collaborative partnership of MIDAS, the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (JRULM), and the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Library.

The University of Manchester has provided high quality computing and information services to the UK Higher Education community for nearly 30 years, and will be able to mount ISI Web of Science alongside the 40 datasets currently hosted at MIDAS. These include Beilstein Crossfire, JSTOR, the UK Census and COPAC plus a variety of additional strategic research and teaching datasets. MIDAS is also very experienced in providing training, user support, and large-scale computing resources for the UK academic community. This coupled with the extensive information and ISI database experience of the JRULM and MMU Library is designed to ensure continuing high standards of service delivery for UK HE.

The Transition

The ISI Web of Science service at MIDAS will commence in September 1999 and the old and new services will overlap until July 2000 to allow a period of transition and training of users. Sites will be required to pay the new subscription rates with effect from 1 April 2000 or thereafter. (This will give current subscribers access to both the old and new service). A demonstration service comprising five years of data, updated weekly, is currently being offered by NISS. Current subscribers to ISI can use it at the following WWW address: http://wos.niss.ac.uk.

Through its consultation with users Jisc is acutely aware of the importance of helping higher education institutions to manage this transition period. In addition to support staff based at MIDAS, JRULM, and MMU, close discussions are being held with the JIBS user group to ensure appropriate additional support is made available for this all-critical transition year.

Don't wait until the end of the transition year to begin using ISI Web of Science at MIDAS! There are very good reasons to begin as soon as possible. First, there is normally a great increase in usage of the ISI service at the beginning of the academic year. The levels of use anticipated for this September and October are too high to be supported by the existing hardware platform at BIDS, thus users may be able to access the new Web of Science service at MIDAS more easily this autumn. Second, ISI has expressed its willingness to respond to user feedback about the new Web of Science service. The earlier feedback from users can begin to arrive at MIDAS, the faster we can feed this information back to ISI.

Finally, Jisc would like to join users in thanking BIDS for all its hard work in providing an excellent ISI service for the last 8 years. We look forward to BIDS and MIDAS working together, and with the user community, to ensure a smooth transitional period.