Jisc works on behalf of its members and customers to negotiate and license the digital content agreements needed to support academic research, teaching and learning.

They aim to influence stakeholders such as funders and publishers to achieve sustainable Open Access (OA). This includes negotiating Read and Publish agreements on behalf of the Higher Education (HE) sector to achieve the best deals for both read access and OA publishing.

Jisc aim to put in place agreements that reduce and constrain costs, accelerate open access publishing, support innovation and increase transparency.  Their negotiations are 'run for the sector, by the sector'. 

Who manages these negotiations

Strategic groups within JISC set the direction of negotiations. 

Members of these groups include UK university senior leaders and representatives from RLUK, ARMA, SCONUL and UKCoRR. Jisc also work with officers from UKRI, Wellcome and Universities UK (UUK). 

Get access to a summary of the Jisc negotations and their status.

Consultation process

Jisc consult with every HE library at each major stage of a negotiation. 

They assess the appetite for risk, ensure sector-wide agreement on next steps and negotiation tactics, and get feedback on institution’s attitude towards agreements and estimate take-up rates. In some instances, they also make direct contact with Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors.

Jisc’s preference is for academics to respond to consultations via their institution and their library. They request that academics do not respond to direct contact from publishers about agreements that are under negotiation.  

Information Services work with Jisc on behalf of the University of Kent by:

• responding to Jisc’s consultations and surveys on behalf of Kent staff and students
• assessing the impact of proposals or changes by using publishing activity data, publication strategy proposals, subscriptions and usage, costs, budgets, author workflows and our experiences with publishers
• making recommendations and consulting with key University stakeholders to coordinate our response in case of crucial, high impact negotiations  
• liaising with publishers and Jisc when Kent staff and students raise queries about publisher workflows
• protecting agreements essential for teaching and research at Kent with top-level library funds
• alerting Divisions to agreements that meet academic requirements, based on their preferred journals and the Divisional library spend 
• updating the Read and Publish webpages, our agreements and author workflows
• updating the Journal search tool for searchable information of journal titles included in our agreements 
• recording articles published OA via an agreement to monitor costs and evaluate value for money
• maintaining publishing usage statistics across each of our Divisions 
• contributing to the development of tools and platforms by participating in working groups.

Tools we use

We use JISC’s services to meet and demonstrate OA funder and publisher requirements and manage cost. For example, Jisc PubRouter, the Sherpa services and Jisc Monitor. These tools help us to work towards embedding open practices and develop open infrastructure.  

Get involved by joining or following one of Jisc's community or working groups.

Contact the Information Services Research and Scholarly Communication Support Team if you have comments or experineces with specific journals or publishers, or you wish to register a response to a major negotiation.