JISC

The Value for Money report, of which this is a summary, looks at the value of some areas of JISC’s activities and explores its value to the education and research community using a variety of measures involving benchmarking, cost comparisons, calculation of time and effort, and other mechanisms.

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

For every £1 of the JISC services budget, the education and research community receives £9 of demonstrable value.

For every £1 JISC spent on securing national agreements for e-resources, the saving to the community was more than £26.

These are the figures revealed by a recently-published Value for Money report on JISC services. Although many countries have centrally provided research and education networks, and some have provided supplementary services, no other country has a comparable single body providing an integrated range of network services, content services, advice, support and development programmes.

Therefore it is impossible to benchmark the whole of JISC’s activities against those of similar organisations. It is possible, in some areas, however, such as network or e-resource provision, to compare an activity with other similar national and international activities, and in others to use a range of mechanisms to quantify value for money.

The Value for Money report, of which this is a summary, looks at the value of some areas of JISC’s activities and explores its value to the education and research community using a variety of measures involving benchmarking, cost comparisons, calculation of time and effort, and other mechanisms.

Content provision

JISC provides access to a wide range of online resources, including journals, images, moving pictures and sound, geospatial data and much more. These resources constitute the largest collection of online resources nationally procured for education and research in the world. Many of these resources require an institutional subscription to the service, while others require no further financial input from institutions.

These figures suggest that for every £1 JISC spent on securing national agreements for e-resources, the saving to the community was more than £26.

Some 40 resources are provided to the community at discounted subscription fees, made possible by JISC negotiated agreements.

A sample analysis of 15 resources provided by JISC, including the Education Image Gallery, Digimap, Know UK and Know Europe reveals that agreements for these resources are calculated as saving at least £20.6m in 2005.

An analysis of seven further e-resources – ‘heritage’ collections, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Royal Society of Chemistry Backfile and Institute of Physics Backfile – shows that a further estimated £3.57m was saved from these seven e-resources alone.

The total savings for all the above resources, plus those gained through journal agreements, is £26.11m with the annual cost of negotiations in 2004 being £982,500.

Time saved by e-resources

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

The use of e-resources is now embedded in education and research and there is evidence that e-resources are accessed more frequently than their paper equivalents.

During 2004-05 there were more than 20 million accesses of JISC-supported resources. If these e-resources were not available, alternatives would include paper-based information, institutionally held CD ROMs, interlibrary loans, visits to libraries at alternative locations, etc. These have time, cost and efficiency implications not experienced with networked electronic resources. These costs can be estimated through savings in staff time gained through the use of e-resources.

Using independent and publicly available figures, these access figures translate into an efficiency saving for university staff active in teaching and research of nearly £156m in 2004-05.

This scenario suggests that for each £1 spent on e-resources provision, the return to the community in value of time saved in information gathering is at least in the order of £18.

Network infrastructure

JANET is the foundation stone upon which UK education and research continue to engage with ICT. However, a considerable part of its value lies in the wide-ranging, high quality, customer focussed support services provided by UKERNA. These include extensive customer support, mail, security, videoconferencing and multicasting services, domain name registration, web services, usenet news and training. This integrated provision is tailored to the particular needs of the JISC community and is not normally part of network provision.

Figures compiled by the pan-European networking association TERENA show that JANET provides a reliable, high quality, highspeed connection at a low cost per connection compared with other European NRENs (National Research and Education Networks). Its cost per institutional connection is not only lower than that for the major European NRENs but is well below the average.

Such figures are mirrored across other UKERNA services, of which there are over 20, including the following:

The JANET Web Hosting Service offers five times the capacity than commercial offerings for a similar cost.

UKERNA subscribes to anti-spam facilities on behalf of all JANET customer organisations. Assuming that such measures save staff members 5 minutes per working week, the annual saving of staff time for HE and FE staff would amount to nearly £19m per annum.

JANET-CERT

an example of value for money

JANET-CERT raises awareness about security threats to the network, helps prevents them and assists institutions in the handling of those threats. There are few commercial security services comparable to the CERT service. However, comparisons with those that do suggest that CERT provision produces a possible saving of almost £1.8m. (This like other comparisons in this value for money report is a conservative one).

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

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.

Advisory services

JISC’s advisory services provide support, guidance and advice to UK further and higher education on a range of issue relating to the use of ICT. While it is impossible to quantify accurately the value that they bring to the education community, nevertheless comparisons between their services and the cost of commercially provided alternatives is possible.

TechDis

an example of value for money

All higher and further education institutions have a legal obligation to promote equality of opportunity for students with disabilities or learning difficulties, in particular to ensure that they are able to participate in education and employment. HESA statistics show that the proportion of students with disabilities or learning difficulties in HE is over 5% and rising steadily.

The ability of FE and HE institutions to meet the needs of students and staff effectively and in accordance with recent legislation has been greatly supported by the advice from TechDis.

TechDis runs workshops and conferences, gives advice, makes available tools, web resources, publications, software and engages in a wide range of activities to support of the education community. Comparisons, where possible, of these activities with those provided by the commercial sector indicate that in 2004-05, for every pound of funding received, TechDis saved the community at least £2.82 pounds.

Such figures are replicated across other JISC-funded advisory services, including the following:

Comparisons such as those above suggest that in 2004-05, for every pound of funding received, JISC infoNet saved the community at least £2.66.

Comparisons such as those above reveal that for £1 of funding for JISC Legal in 2004-05 the value to the community was equivalent to at least £1.41.

The value of JISC

The value of JISC activities extends beyond the benefits identified here. Education and research are high-value commodities that play an important role in the UK economy and underpin the UK’s global economic position. Statistics show that the network infrastructure, content provision and advisory services developed and funded by JISC provide excellent value for money and, further, that they make a vital contribution to the UK education and research community.

A separate study into the value of JISC’s research and development activities is currently underway

Read the full Value for Money report

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