The benefits of working with Eduserv Chest

Chest and Eduserv 
Eduserv is a charity, the beneficiary of which, through the Eduserv Foundation, is education in the UK. Chest, as a service of Eduserv, acts as any other commercial organisation but with one major difference - trading surplus is returned via the charity to the education community.

Eduserv is managed through a Board of Trustees, whose members collectively possess a wealth of experience in all aspects of the work undertaken by Chest. They are available to offer specialist advice, and technical expertise is available from Chest's sister services under the Eduserv umbrella, Eduserv Internet and Athens. Eduserv possesses its own infrastructure including servers, network connections and email services.

About Chest
Chest has been providing negotiation and management services to the UK education and research community since 1988. It was created under the auspices of the Computer Board - the predecessor of the JISC - to research, negotiate and manage community-wide agreements for software. As the needs of education have developed so has Chest's remit. We have extended our activities to include data, text sources and courseware, and to user bases in other educational areas. Currently all HE institutions, over 75 per cent of FE colleges and a few schools in the UK are participating in at least one agreement.

Currently Chest manages nearly 150 agreements with over 5000 licences covering:

• Desktop software, including products from Microsoft and Corel
• Graphics products ranging from AVS Express to Uniras
• GIS software and mapping data
• Utilities such as firewalls, helpdesks, email and backup products
• Statistical and other analysis products
• Discovery tools such as abstract and index databases
• Journals
• Geospatial products
• Learning materials

Chest employs staff with experience in the negotiation and management of all aspects of contracts. The range of formal qualifications and experience includes contract law, accountancy, business management, teaching and library and museum expertise. Eduserv's employment policy is to actively encourage staff to obtain and constantly update current relevant experience and qualifications.

Both the user community and the supplier community trust the integrity and independence of Chest. Among suppliers and users Chest has earned a reputation for even-handedness and a respect for confidentiality. Users acknowledge Chest as a source of honest and reliable agreements and offers and recognise that Chest will always do its utmost to ensure that the community gets the best value.

Chest has recourse to lawyers and accountants whose particular expertise includes matters associated with intellectual property. It is worth noting that in the years during which Chest has negotiated and managed agreements for the community it has never had occasion to resort to outside legal advice in respect of any dispute with a supplier or academic institution.

The benefits brought to the community by Chest have earned plaudits from consortia around the world and emulation in several countries, notably the Republic of Ireland. In the UK the National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce have both cited Chest as an example of 'Best Practice'.

Considerable international and national awareness has resulted in Chest being invited onto the evaluation panel for the Canadian Digital Library. Chest has also been invited to give presentations on its activities in virtually every European country as well as Australia, South Africa and the United States. Chest is a member of ICOLC, IATUL, UKSG, EDUCAUSEand UCISA. It has a formal partnership arrangement with AoC NILTA and a collaboration agreement with SURFdiensten, part of the SURF Foundation which covers all of the academic community in the Netherlands.

Chest and Athens Access Management System
As part of Eduserv, Chest has a close relationship with the Athens team which develops and provides access controls and management to software and data. Athens is the de-facto standard for secure access management to online services for the UK education and health sectors. Over 800 organisations have chosen to use Athens facilities to create single usernames for access to over 250 online services. These include leaders of the electronic publishing industry such as Elsevier Science and SWETS. The benefits to organisations of using Athens include:

• Ability to provide secure access both on and off campus
• Single-sign-on capability allowing the creation of an information web of internal and external services with seamless one-shot authentication
• Service providers who implement Athens protection gain access to the large and growing markets of UK education and health and reduce their in-house costs of managing usernames, passwords and IP addresses
• Athens is easy to implement as an addition to a service's own authentication system using sets of standard libraries

The Benefits Provided by Chest

In all negotiations with suppliers Chest aims to achieve a win/win situation whereby each and every supplier and academic institution derives substantial benefit. This can be achieved by:

Reducing your Overheads
by negotiating with one body representing over:

• 190 higher education institutions
• 500 further education institutions
• 300 associated institutions whose principle business is education
• 50 universities and third level colleges in the Republic of Ireland

These institutions have in excess of six million staff and students who can be introduced to your products through a Chest Agreement.

Chest also negotiates on behalf of

• NHS trusts
• Public libraries
• Schools via Local Education Authorities
• Other overseas academic institutions and around 200 technical universities world-wide via our partnership with IATUL(the International Association of Technological University Libraries)

A door to many millions of potential users is thus opened to you through a Chest Agreement.

Increasing the Market Penetration of Your Product

• The students of today are the decision makers and commercial users of tomorrow - familiarity with products they have used as students will influence their purchase choices as decision makers and buyers in the commercial, industrial, service and educational sectors

   

• Chest does not promote one product over another but does promote, very widely, any offer it has negotiated. This is done via mailings to all our contacts in each institution. In addition details of each Agreement are published on our fully searchable website. We also provide details of a wide range of products through our online Chest Directory. Other promotional literature is produced for exhibitions and events which Chest staff attend, and we produce two, twice yearly, high quality "Chest Matters" newsletters; one aimed at the Higher Education community and the other at the Further Education community

Reducing the Price to the Education Community

• Increasingly, budget cuts mean that institutions have to seek to reduce spending on software and data and are having to make hard choices about which materials can be purchased
• Where possible the pricing is tiered to make it as affordable as possible to all institutions - Chest is able to produce a variety of charging models which relate to the product's relevance to an institution
• Chest does not pursue any agreement that does not offer added value in terms of pricing and conditions to the community

Chest manages the administration of formal agreements thus reducing a supplier's cost of sales. The administration can comprise all or any of the following:

• Promoting the offer to the education community
• Processing all licence paperwork
• Dealing with all licence queries
• Limiting the amount of technical queries the supplier receives
• Managing a discussion list about the product to promote awareness
• Invoicing individual institutions, making payments on behalf of all licensed institutions to the supplier
• Chest pays on time! We have an excellent reputation for making payments within 30 days of being invoiced

Since 1988 Chest has been working with, advising and assisting suppliers on product suitability, timing and awareness. We have at least one named contact at every one of our member sites.

Value added by Chest
What value does Chest's approach bring to users? The bottom line - Chest estimates that the total value added to the UK and Ireland education community since 1988 is in excess of £1 billion. Chest alone could not have achieved this. It has involved collaboration with special interest groups and individuals acting as assessors and evaluators, with support from the Computer Board, JISC and UCISA.

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 made by going through only one negotiation are substantial. Tendering is resource intensive and is best left to persons skilled in the area. Chest clarifies and refines both the supplier's and the community's requirements to help deliver the right product on the right terms at the right time.