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THE CHEST DATA MESSENGER
27th April 2001 URL:http://www.chest.ac.uk/
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CONTENTS
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1. Value added by CHEST
1. Value added by CHEST
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CHEST is often asked what value does its approach bring to users, and
this is a brief attempt to answer that question.
CHEST has been involved in negotiating on behalf of the HE and FE
communities and Research Councils since it was established over 13 years
ago by the Computer Board, the fore-runner of the JISC. Nowadays, CHEST,
as part of the charity "EduServ", has agreements covering over 12,000
products with suppliers of software, data and learning materials.
Co-ordinating the needs of the community through one negotiating Agent
and in so doing emphasising that this is the wish of the community
brings benefit to the community and to the supplier. The cost savings
through one negotiation are substantial. Tendering is resource intensive
and is best left to persons skilled in this area. This doesn't mean
losing control of the requirement because a good agent will clarify the
requirement and have a duty to deliver the right product on the right
terms.
One example is the ISI Web of Science, the most used data in the
academic community and currently licensed by 147 institutions. If each
institution were to buy from ISI at the usual academic rates the cost
would be of the order of £65k each a year. Clearly a difficult, if not
impossible, figure for any institution. In fact, as a result of the
CHEST consortia arrangement, institutions pay considerably less than one
tenth of this figure. In total this equates to a value added of over
£60 million per year. Similar CHEST consortia arrangements for CrossFire
have achieved an 80% discount, in this case by the CHEST negotiated
participation of universities in Scandinavia.
The consortia approach leads to other savings, particularly in the area
of collaboration and problem sharing, and the collective influence users
can exert on suppliers. Many enhancements to the ISI Web of Science
service are directly attributable to the collective input focused
through the Web of Science Enhancement Committee.
There has been a CHEST agreement for over 13 years for the AVS UNIRAS
software with a greater than 90% discount for the 80 licensed
institutions. These are site licences permitting unlimited copying to an
institution's own machines, at less than the cost of a single commercial
licence. The value added has been huge.
Over 650 higher and further education institutions have made savings on
their Microsoft products because central negotiation by CHEST set up an
arrangement where all purchases attracted discounts based on the
purchasing power of the total community.
CHEST estimates that the total value added over the last 13 years has
been around £1 billion. CHEST alone could not have achieved this. It has
involved collaboration with special interest groups and individuals who
acted as assessors and evaluators, and support from the Computer Board,
JISC and UCISA.
********* END OF CHEST DATA MESSENGER: 27th April 2001 ***********
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