Important Announcement for all UKHE students, staff, libraries, 
and information services
  
(apologies for cross-posting, but please forward to all 
appropriate lists)

*****  Update on Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web 
of Science® and the UK Higher Education Community *****

New Information Service
  
The ISI service, which is currently hosted by BIDS at the 
University of Bath is the most successful and longest running of 
the subscription data services offered by the Joint Information 
Systems Committee (JISC).  ISI is used extensively throughout 
the UK Higher Education community in both research and teaching. 
The service has been operational for eight years and the current 
contract expires in March 2000. CHEST has negotiated renewal of 
the contract with ISI, on behalf of JISC, resulting in an offer 
for ISI's new "Web of Science" service.
  
Following extensive consultation with the user community, and 
fully considering the implications of moving from the ISI 
service to the new ISI Web of Science service, JISC agreed that 
Web of Science should replace the current ISI service.

The Web of Science is ISI's new interface that provides Web 
access to the Science Citation Index ExpandedTM, Social Sciences 
Citation Index®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index® (formerly 
SciSearch, Social SciSearch, and Arts & Humanities Search).  It 
will also provide access to ISTP® (Index to Scientific and 
Technical Proceedings). This is the same data provided under the 
current ISI agreement.  JCR® (Journal Citation Report) has been 
confirmed as an additional option for Web of Science, and 
discussions are continuing about Reaction CenterTM (part of the 
ISI Chemistry ServerSM) and Derwent Innovations IndexSM.

The new service will be available to all Higher Education 
Institutions funded by HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW and DENI together 
with a number of additional sites from the CHEST list. In 
accordance with JISC's agreed policy on banded charging for 
datasets, UK HEIs have been divided into three categories for 
this service.  These bands are based on those used for the JSTOR 
service, with the small and very small HEIs combined into a 
single group. All other sites on the CHEST list at 
http://www.chest.ac.uk/chestsites.html will be treated as large 
for the purpose of this service. 
 
The subscription costs for the Web of Science service will be as 
advertised in JISC Circular 16/98 which was sent to all UKHEIs 
in October 1998 (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/c16_98.html).  The 
subscription price of the current BIDS ISI service has to date 
been subsidised by the JISC by approximately £1,500 per site per 
annum. The subscription price of the new Web of Science Service 
in 2000/01 has been set at the same level as the existing 
service although  Large sites will see an increase of £1,500 
because the subsidy will disappear. Medium and Small sites will 
see immediate savings of £1,500 and £4,500 respectively. The 
increase in costs and loss of subsidy has been phased to lessen 
the impact on institutions. The Web of Science service will also 
be available to Further Education institutions but the 
subscription prices have not yet been determined. 

New Service Provider
  
As ISI Web of Science is a completely new information service 
requiring a different hardware platform and different support 
from the service provider serving the information to UK higher 
education institutions, JISC followed its normal policy of going 
to tender for service provision. The successful bid came from 
MIDAS at Manchester Computing, University of Manchester who will 
host the ISI Web of Science service.  The service will be 
provided by a close collaborative partnership of MIDAS, the John 
Rylands University Library of Manchester (JRULM), and the 
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Library.

The University of Manchester has provided high quality computing 
and information services to the UK Higher Education community 
for nearly 30 years, and will be able to mount ISI Web of 
Science alongside the 40 datasets currently hosted at MIDAS.  
These include Beilstein Crossfire, JSTOR, the UK Census and 
COPAC plus a variety of additional strategic research and 
teaching datasets.  MIDAS is also very experienced in providing 
training, user support, and large-scale computing resources for 
the UK academic community.  This coupled with the extensive 
information and ISI database experience of the JRULM and MMU 
Library is designed to ensure continuing high standards of 
service delivery for UK HE.
 
The Transition
  
The ISI Web of Science service at MIDAS will commence in 
September 1999 and the old and new services will overlap until 
July 2000 to allow a period of transition and training of users. 
Sites will be required to pay the new subscription rates with 
effect from 1 April 2000 or thereafter. (This will give current 
subscribers access to both the old and new service).  A 
demonstration service comprising five years of data, updated 
weekly, is currently being offered by NISS. Current subscribers 
to ISI can use it at the following WWW address: 
http://wos.niss.ac.uk.
 
Through its consultation with users JISC is acutely aware of the 
importance of helping higher education institutions to manage 
this transition period.  In addition to support staff based at 
MIDAS, JRULM, and MMU, close discussions are being held with the 
JIBS user group to ensure appropriate additional support is made 
available for this all-critical transition year.

Don't wait until the end of the transition year to begin using 
ISI Web of Science at MIDAS!  There are very good reasons to 
begin as soon as possible.  First, there is normally a great 
increase in usage of the ISI service at the beginning of the 
academic year.  The levels of use anticipated for this September 
and October are too high to be supported by the existing 
hardware platform at BIDS, thus users may be able to access the 
new Web of Science service at MIDAS more easily this autumn.  
Second, ISI has expressed its willingness to respond to user 
feedback about the new Web of Science service.  The earlier 
feedback from users can begin to arrive at MIDAS, the faster we 
can feed this information back to ISI.
 
Finally, JISC would like to join users in thanking BIDS for all 
its hard work in providing an excellent ISI service for the last 
8 years. We look forward to BIDS and MIDAS working together, and 
with the user community, to ensure a smooth transitional period.

Further Information
  
from JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/):
Alice Colban, CEI Secretary, [log in to unmask], (0117) 931 
7257
Alicia Wise, Collections Manager, [log in to unmask], (0171) 
848 2556
Jane Williams, Head of JISC-Assist, [log in to unmask], 
(0117) 954 6850

from MIDAS (http://www.midas.ac.uk/):
Julia Chruszcz, Head of National Services, [log in to unmask], 
(0161) 275 6100
Ross MacIntyre, Project Manager, [log in to unmask], (0161) 
275 7181

from JRULM (http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/)
Diana Leitch, Deputy Librarian, [log in to unmask], (0161) 
275 3737

from MMU Library (http://mmu.ac.uk/)
Gill Barry, Deputy Librarian, [log in to unmask], (0161) 247 
6101
  
Or see details of the contract with ISI on the CHEST website as 
they become available: 
http://www.chest.ac.uk/datasets/isi-wos/contents.html

____________________________________________________________

Alicia L. Wise                                   [log in to unmask]
Collections Manager
Joint Information Systems Committee
Information Services & Systems
King's College London	                  Tel:  (0171) 848 2556
Strand	             	                         Fax:  (0171) 848 1777
London WC2R 2LS	                     Mobile: (0411) 376 256
UK

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