Our subscription package for higher education

Jump to:

• Network infrastructure
• Security technologies and services
• Collaborative technologies

Network infrastructure

• Janet network1
  Access to the UK’s most secure high performance research network.
• International connectivity
  Enabling research and education collaboration globally by connecting the Janet network to other national networks through GÉANT.
• Access management (including Shibboleth, Eduroam)
  Provides teachers, students and researchers with secure, authenticated access to digital resources wherever they are.
• Aurora
  A dedicated dark-fibre infrastructure, supporting research and development collaboration between your researchers and international partners.
• IP address assignment
  We have a range of addresses we can assign for you, allowing you to make the best use of a limited resource.
• Janet web hosting
  A safe, resilient and secure space for your websites.
• NTP (network time protocol)
  Time synchronisation is critical on IT networks, and we'll make sure that time is reliable, accurate and secure across your network.
• Netsight
  Monitoring over 1200 connections for over 850 users, Janet Netsight is designed to provide you with insight into your network status and performance.
• Nameserver services
  We allow your organisation to publish and manage domain name system records on a central nameserver through a secure web portal.
• Off site resolver
  Intended for organisations with smaller networks, this service provides domain name resolution for e-mail and web requests - ensuring you stay connected to the Internet.
• Domain name allocation
  We allocate you with the primary and secondary nameservers for your domain names registered under .ac.uk.
• Framework agreements
  Agreements for products and services procured through third parties, enabling you to get the best value (eg Janet 3G, Janet txt, videoconferencing equipment, switches and routers).
• Amazon Web Services
  Peered with the Janet network to improve connectivity and reduce your bandwidth charges.
• Telephony purchasing service
  Close to launch, this service allows you to move your telephony service onto the Janet network and start reaping the cost savings.

Security technologies and services

• Computer Security Incident Response Team
  Safeguarding your current and future network security.
• Janet Mailer Shield
  Helping you manage your mail facilities, offering additional security by identifying the source of a message and indicating whether it is listed in any real-time blocklists.
• Email advice and testing
  STAN, the Janet Spam-relay Tester and Notification System, tests your email servers to check they are secure against unauthorised messages, and reports any vulnerabilities.
• DNS blocklists and whitelists
  Access to a number of leading blocklists and whitelists, keeping you secure from email abuse or spam.

Collaborative technologies

• Janet videoconferencing
  Equipping the sector with videoconferencing services, enabling communication and collaboration across the UK and globally.
• Voice Advisory Service
  Offering impartial advice on voice technologies such as Voice over IP (VOIP) or IP telephony.
• Video Technology Advisory Service
  A team of specialist advisers are on hand to offer you unbiased technical evaluations and advice on video technology.
• WTAS (Wireless Technology Advisory Service)
  Providing you with independent technical advice and support in wireless technologies.
• MCAS (Multi-site Connectivity Advisory Service)
  Providing you with advice and guidance for connecting or upgrading network links between your campuses and remote centres.

• Lightpath2
  A centrally managed service that provides dedicated point-to-point network connections between Janet-connected organisations.
• Janet co-location service
  Providing space in a fully managed datacentre with direct connectivity to the Janet network.
• Janet training
  Providing you with a programme of high quality training events on topics related to the Janet network and related services.
• Cloud and data centre frameworks
  Access to framework agreements and the best possible value from commercial suppliers.
• Cloud services for education agreements
  Nationally negotiated deals for commercial products such as Microsoft 365, Dropbox for teams, Azure and Google Apps.
• Financial X-ray
  Helping you easily understand and compare costs for particular IT services, allowing you to analyse your current costs, and make the case for change.

Security technologies and services

• Janet ESISS
  Providing testing and consultancy services aimed at reducing the vulnerability of your organisation to significant information security breaches.
• Janet certificate service
  Software certificates providing your end-users with assurance of your website services.
• Web filtering
  Tailored to your local policies to prevent access to unauthorised websites and urls.

Collaborative technologies

• Janet txt
  A secure SMS messaging service allowing you to manage and distribute messages to specific individuals, specific groups or all staff and students via their mobiles, landline or email.
  Janet 3G
  High capacity data service, giving your academic and support staff network access on the move.
• Webmail
  Web based email for institutions with built in protection to reduce the threat from viruses and spam.

Quality

The Janet network isn’t your average broadband. Our uncontended network means if every one of you accessed the core network at the same time there wouldn’t be a drop in speed.

Capacity

Janet is built specifically to serve the requirements of education and research:

• avoiding congestion by providing capacity according to need and demand 
• the ability to scale capacity responsively
• the flexibility to meet the needs of the sectors it serves

• Jisc Collections
  A national shared service, the academic consortium that negotiates licenses and subscriptions to global scholarly content and digital information resources. 
  Journal agreements especially negotiated for UK HE include:
  • Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, the Wiley Online Library and titles from Nature Publishing Group
  • Negotiated agreements for abstracting and indexing databases include Thomson Reuters Web of Science, Elsevier’s SciVerse Scopus and Reaxys and full text databases include JSTOR’s - Arts & Sciences collections
  • Negotiated agreements for online reference materials include Oxford Reference Online, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online and Cambridge Companions Online.
• Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP)
  A shared portal to enable more efficient access to journal usage statistics. 
• Knowledge Base+
  A shared service knowledge base for UK academic libraries to support the management of e-resources.
• Digitised resources
  Funding the creation of new high quality and sustainable digital resources in response to the needs of researchers, teachers and students.
• UK Access Management Federation
  Provides teachers, students and researchers with easy online access to their own institution whether they are elsewhere in the UK or overseas.
• Copac
  An open access catalogue, providing details of the combined holdings of over 70 major university and national libraries.
• SUNCAT
  Enables researchers and librarians to locate journals, periodicals and newspapers held in libraries throughout the UK.
• Zetoc
  The world's largest research databases, enabling systematic search, through the British Library electronic table of contents.
• Archives Hub
  The gateway to archive collections, providing descriptions of the combined archives of over 200 participating institutions in England, Scotland and Wales.
• Jorum
  Sharing open education resources for learning and teaching.
• BUFVC
  Supports the use of moving images and related media through delivery of services,  databases, publications and a variety of other activities.
• The Keepers Registry
  Provides easily accessible information about the archiving arrangements for electronic journals.
• Journal Archives
  Jisc Collections has funded the free provision of journal archives for UK higher educations, which provide a deeper search for those institutions that subscribe to Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry, Oxford University Press, American Chemical Society and Institution of Civil Engineers journals. Jisc Collections also funded free and perpetual access to the Web of Science backfiles, providing search back to 1970.

• BoB National
  A shared off-air recording archive provides teachers and students with online access to television and radio programmes from more than 50 television and radio channels.
• Jisc eCollections
  A digital library of 300,000 books published in Britain before 1800, journal archives and film and video content to support research and teaching in the Jisc community.
• Geospatial resources including access and support for:
  • Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection
    Ordnance Survey mapping and data products
  • Geology Digimap
    British Geological Survey mapping and data products
  • Historic Digimap
    British historic maps and mapping data
  • Marine Digimap
    HydroSpatial vector data and charted raster marine maps
• 18th and 19th and 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 2012-2014 3
  • Parliamentary publication includes debates, proceedings and reports of their committees and more going back to 1688.
  • The British Periodicals Collections I and II provide online access to nearly 6.1 million pages from over 460 journals published from the 1681 to the 1937.
  • Periodicals Archive Online: Jisc Collections Selection provides online access to over 288,000 articles from a subset of 80 full text journals published between 1891 and 2000.

Negotiating for you

We offers the sector better deals and streamlined access to subscription journals, content and digital information. Our work saves you and the sector over £75.5 million in subscription costs every year.

Helping you manage your subscriptions

Our digital resources management and analysis services enable universities to optimise their digital content, data and information subscriptions. This helps you avoid cost wastage and to manage, discover and curate your digital resources much more efficiently. We estimate that these services will save the sector £4.5 million in staff costs alone.

• Specialist advice, information and support
  We support you online and in person on all aspects of the use of digital technologies in research, teaching and business processes.
  Our advisory services cover a wide range of issues and specialist areas including:
  • legal aspects of ICT
  • disability and accessibility
  • research data curation and digital preservation
  • innovative use of digital media

  We also provide a range of best practice guides, examples and tools in the following areas:

  • student experience
  • institutional management
  • research excellence
  • reducing costs
• Our annual digifest and other Jisc events
  Membership rates or free attendance.
• Access to specialist online communities
  JISCMail brings together over a million people in education and research enabling them to share ideas, information and knowledge on a diverse range of topics.
• Training
  Netskills provide reduced cost training to help the sector to make effective use of innovative technology.
• Network showcase
  Demonstrating the power of the Janet network with real-time projects, such as orchestras streaming masterclasses, or exploring the potential of Ultra High Definition video.

• Procurement support
  The online store for the sector, ensuring the best value for money on the goods and services bought across your institution.
• HE shared legal information
  Generating informal and commissioning formal legal advice from the legal profession on a shared basis.

Research enablement

• Open access
  Providing support in the implementation of open access policies at the institutional and national level through the development and piloting of guidance, technologies, solutions and services, including:
  • UK Open Access Implementation Group
    The group, made up of representatives from the UK education and research sector, works to clarify and develop solutions towards the implementation of Open Access in the UK.
  • Gold open access
    Identifying future trends and defining services to support gold open access.
  • Digital repository services
    Developing a set of key shared services to ensure more consistency across institutional repositories, including:
    • guidance on deposit and funding policies through Sherpa Romeo
    • automated deposit through repository junction broker
    • repository usage statistics at IRUS
    • search including the development of CORE
    • Shared services in repositories to supporting deposit, curation and exposure of open access research literature.
  • Metadata profiles and vocabularies
    RIOXX and Vocabularies for Open Access (V4OA) compliant with the RCUK research management and open access policies and international standards.
• Research information management
  Establishing a consensus on standards, such as ORCID for researcher identifiers, and CERIF for research reporting and management.
• Gateway for Higher Education
  Tools enabling universities to use the data submitted to research councils for their own reporting purposes and to improve collaboration between institutions.
• Research data management
  • Promoting the publication, reuse and archiving of research data, helping to support research impact.
  • Developing research data management practice, policy, infrastructure, training and tools at universities to fulfil research council requirements.
  • Creating opportunities for more data intensive and collaborative research through tools such as BRISSkit, which allows the sharing of medical data for research purposes.
• Research Data Registry
  Uncovering research data from across all of the UK’s universities to increase access and encourage re-use.
• Research tools
  Piloting the development of new research tools that support research infrastructure (e.g. cloud computing) and collaboration such as:
  • Social web analytics for research (COSMOS)
  • Citizen science app supporting wildlife research (eg. BatMobile)
  • A research information system for neuroscientists (NeuroHub)
• Access to BBC archives
  Providing new research opportunities through access to broadcast TV and audio in collaboration with the BBC and BUFVC.
• Developing a national monograph strategy
  We are exploring the potential for a national approach to the collection, preservation, supply and digitisation of scholarly monographs.
• Research-centric library service models
  Working to understand research practices across universities and disciplines, to inform support in information discovery, research dissemination, scholarly communications and digital research.

Learning, teaching and the student experience

Our research and development activity around learning and teaching has resulted in a range of resources and services that are freely available to the whole sector.

Through reports and events such as open webinars (see What is a MOOC? and Developing Digital Literacies) and the Innovating eLearning conference we give you access to our work in progress. This gives you first sight of emerging guidance and allowing you to pilot the latest technologies and approaches.

• Digital visitors and residents
  Research providing institutions with an insight into the motivations and behaviours of students in the digital environment and helping inform the development of new digital services. A short online course in this area is being developed.
• Mobile technologies
  Providing funding for apps and mobile websites and the development of guidance and resources to support institutions with delivering mobile services and content.
• Summer of Student Innovation
  Students were invited to create real technology solutions for potential adoption by learning providers.
• National Student Change Agent Network
  A network designed to support both staff working with student change agents and the students themselves.
• Access to BBC archives (RES)
  Providing new education opportunities through access to broadcast TV and audio in collaboration with the BBC and BUFVC.

Sector and enterprise efficiency

• Library systems development
  Supporting the next generation of library systems and requirements including the support of two national shared library management system approaches in Wales and Scotland.
• Costing ICT services
  Helping your institution to make informed decisions when selecting new systems or when choosing to outsource to third party providers or the cloud.  
• Software solutions
  Developing ways to share software for maximum re-use.
• Integrating digital literacy
  Working with professional associations representing UK research, teaching, administrative, library and professional services staff in HE and FE to ensure the maximum uptake of digital literacy.
• Efficiency exchange
  Giving you the opportunity to share best practice around institutional efficiency.
• Developing a national monograph strategy
  Working with RLUK, SCONUL, RUGIT and UCISA, we are exploring the potential for a national approach to scholarly monographs.
• Clarifying curation costs (4Cs)
  Helping organisations across Europe to invest more effectively in digital curation and preservation.

Collaboration and internationalisation

• Management of libraries’ e-resources (GoKB)
  We are working with international partners to make it easier for libraries to manage their electronic resources and increase their potential for collaboration and greater efficiency.
• International research infrastructure
  We are working to support international collaboration in research through involvement in areas such as:
  • Access and identity management (Internet 2 and Terena)
  • Research data management (Knowledge Exchange)
• Approaches to discovery (Discovery Summit)
  In 2013 we hosted an international Discovery summit designed to share knowledge about current trends in making library, archive and museum collections easier to find and use.
• Shared practice policy and development
  Influencing policy and developing shared practice through projects such as e-infranet and SIM4RDM in the following areas:
  • Data infrastructures
  • Green and cloud computing
  • Open infrastructure
• Collaboration pilot
  Building on SURF Conext we are piloting tools and solutions to allow collaboration across organisations, sectors and countries.

Data and analytics

• Library analytics and metrics
  Developing a shared analytics dashboard for UK academic libraries, enabling you to improve your services to students, teachers and researchers.
• UK web archive for social science research
  Understanding how researchers can analyse the web using our UK web domain data set, a 30 terabyte web archive of the .uk domain collected from 1996 to 2010.
• Collaborative online social media observatory (COSMOS)
  A joint project with ESRC taking a cross disciplinary approach to exploring the potential uses of social media data in social science research.
• Promoting the use of analytics and ‘big data’
  We are examining the potential impact of this area and recent reports include:
  • Value of analytics to institutions
  • Benefits of activity data
  • Value and benefit of text mining in research

Solutions from business and other sectors

We search for promising ideas and effective ways to translate new digital solutions from other sectors and contexts, from big global organisations to smaller SMEs.

• Costing ICT services
  Helping your institution to make informed decisions when selecting new systems or when choosing to outsource to third party providers or the cloud.  
• Relationship management
  Supporting you to work strategically with your partners and customers including students, alumni, businesses and local authorities, to earn revenue, enhance reputation and gain knowledge and experience.
• Green ICT
  Sharing best practise to help reduce your energy usage. Across the sector this work has already reduced the carbon footprint, reduced waste generated by ICT use and increased expertise in sustainable ICT.
• Open innovation
  Helping you to promote research expertise, find appropriate partners, manage collaborations online and share resources securely.
• Business intelligence
  Helping you to use accurate, up to date and easily-accessible data about your organisation and its environment to plan for the future and optimise limited resources.
• Business and community engagement
  Supporting universities and colleges to use business-led and strategic management approaches to delivering transformational change.

Institutional and academic leadership in the digital age

• Senior management support
  A series of pilot projects helping English institutions to make strategic changes in the way they use technology to support learning, teaching and the student experience. The outcomes will be available to the whole of the UK.

Digital security, access and identity management

Continued development of services supporting:

• Improving access management:
  • eduroam
    Aiming for increase coverage to wider public sector and commercial organisations, engage with school sector and increase adoption in FE.
  • UK Access Management Federation and eduGAIN
    Working to increase the use of eduGAIN by UKAMF members and demonstrate benefits of greater international collaboration.
  • Certificate service
    Improvements to the user experience and increased security by encouraging institutions to use higher assurance certificates.
• Identity management guidance
  Advice to the sector on good practice and policy and piloting new identity management technologies and solutions such as:
  • RAPTOR toolkit - for making more informed management decisions based on access and usage statistics
  • Moonshot - Janet pilot service with GÉANT to develop a single unifying technology to extend the benefits of federated identity to a broad range of web and non-web services (eg. cloud, HPC, Grid infrastructures but also mail, file store, remote access and instant messaging).

Digital standards and policies

• UK Access Management Federation
  Working to increase the use of eduGAIN by UKAMF members and demonstrate benefits of greater international collaboration.
• Research data
  Working with the Research Data Alliance and CASRAI to develop standards in areas such as research data management plans, metadata and citation.
• Research outputs and repositories
  Development of metadata profiles, vocabularies and supporting the adoption of standards in these areas through work with Niso, CERIF and a range of stakeholders.
• Usage data standards
  Developed through the work of IRUS and working with COUNTER.
• Standards
  Development through the European standardisation process, such as XCRI_CAP and Question and Test Interoperability (QTI).
• Computing protocols
  Developing best practice in, for examples application programming interfaces (APIs).

Our co-design ethos means we work in partnership with developers, students and fellow experts across higher education, further education and skills to deliver solutions today as well as for tomorrow.  

The Jisc Summer of Innovation project worked with students considering the best ways for them to improve their learning experiences and achieve more.

And our research has already influenced developments in technology such as Moonshot, Archives Hub, Automated Provisioning and Janet6, which will continue to support the UK's knowledge economy to ensure that you will always have the digital resilience and flexibility you need.