SCONUL and Jisc have negotiated a national agreement with not-for-profit Our Research. The agreement will help individual SCONUL members in the UK to use Unsub, a data analysis and dashboard tool that enables libraries and consortia to independently assess the value of the journal subscriptions they hold with publishers.

The agreement, arranged in response to sector demand following a consultation by SCONUL, will also allow universities to assess and share various scenarios of selecting journal titles. Modelling different scenarios gives university libraries greater insight into the value of their subscription packages, with the opportunity to share their outcomes with the Jisc consortium to enable greater oversight in support of national negotiation activities.

SCONUL is also pleased to announce that a reduced rate for Unsub membership for SCONUL members in the UK has been agreed through Jisc.  

In summary, the offer provides institutions with access to data from all publishers supported by Unsub through their institutional analytics tools, as well as a consortia dashboard tool developed with Jisc.  It delivers a number of benefits:

• Jisc will provide support services to reduce the administrative burden on SCONUL members and increase data accuracy and efficiency.
• Jisc will work with members to define product and information requirements and work with the Unsub team to improve the Unsub tool in line with the needs of SCONUL members.
• Jisc has separately paid for and developed with Unsub a consortium tool that offers consortium level analysis and visualisations of aggregated data from member institutional Unsub accounts, which will provide enhanced insights to better inform negotiations.
• Members will have access to selected consortium views in order to better understand the national picture.
• The national agreement will include the development of the two-way sharing of journal titles selection scenarios between Institutions and Jisc. This functionality, which will be delivered in the coming months, will enable the negotiation collection scenarios to be pushed from the consortium level to institutional Unsub accounts. Members will then have access to the scenarios, filtered accordingly to their institutional data, to examine and analyse the impact at the local level. Institutions will then be able to modify the scenarios and push the changes back to the consortium dashboard, where Jisc can analyse and evaluate the modifications across the consortium. The development will also enable scenarios created by institutions to be viewed and used via the Jisc Consortium to enable greater oversight of the consortium and to support its negotiation.

The pricing includes a reduction of 10% of Unsub’s standard pricing and takes account of contracts which are already in place.  

To read the full press release please click here: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/new-national-agreement-helps-uk-universities...