JISC Digest Issue 1

high-quality content for UK education and research
and exemplars for institutional initiatives, but will
also dovetail with wider national efforts through the
framework activities mentioned above and with the
user needs, sustainability and other requirements
called for by the EU initiative.
__________
JISC Collections
JISC is setting up a new content procurement
company, to be known as JISC Collections, to
continue its work in licensing online resources on
behalf of the FE and HE communities. The new
company will be incorporated in August 2006 and
will be encouraged to work with other education,
research and cultural organisations.
Further information about JISC Collections will be
posted to Vice-chancellors and librarians in May.
__________
8. Other
IPR consultants
JISC has appointed Professor Charles Oppenheim,
Professor Sol Picciotto and Naomi Korn as IPR
consultants to its Development Group for two
years. They will be working to alert JISC to issues
that arise relating to IPR, areas which may require
policy decisions or statements and to inform policy
development.
development as well as providing guidelines on
copyright, licensing, trademarks, patents and
development practice.
The briefing is available at:
www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=pub_ossbp
For the background on open source software,
please go to:
www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/opensourcepolicy.xml
Forthcoming events
JISC is a sponsor of this year's World Wide Web
Conference, the global event to bring together the
key influencers, decision makers, technologists,
businesses and standards bodies shaping the future
of the web, to be held in Edinburgh from May 22nd.
www.iw3c2.org/
This year's joint conference between JISC and CNI
(Coalition for Networked Information) will be held
in York on the 6th and 7th July. Topics to be
discussed at this year's event include digital
curation and preservation, e-theses, ICT in the
Humanities and Social Sciences, institutional
repositories, resource discovery and open access.
Open source software
JISC is currently briefing colleges and universities
to raise awareness of the issue of open source
software. 'Open source' refers to software whose
source code is openly available to be modified by
end-users, in contrast to proprietary software.
While such software is already in use in colleges
and universities, it is rarely yet part of institutional
policies and strategies.
The new briefing paper comes after guidelines
(www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=about_opensourc
epolicy) issued last year by JISC for its projects and
follow from the Government's published policy
(www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_
document.asp?docnum=905) which, in 2004, set out
guidance for the exploitation of publicly funded
software development as the default for JISC
funded software development. In its latest
guidelines, JISC - supported by its advisory service
OSS Watch (www.oss-watch.ac.uk) - advocates the
use of open source as the default for software
The items included in this digest are selective.
A more comprehensive view of JISC's activities
is available from other regular JISC
publications, including the monthly JISC
Headlines. For further information, and to give
feedback on this publication, please contact:
p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk.