Higher education subscription
Jisc membership gives you access to trusted advice, products and services, communities and events.

We work in partnership with your university to deliver value every day – for you and the sector as a whole. Our impact is wide-ranging with multiple touchpoints across a single organisation to meet the unique needs of each university and its people, creating collaborative solutions for higher education challenges.
Technology
The world-class Janet Network is the bedrock of our connectivity, cyber security, and cloud services. As the UK’s National Research and Education Network (NREN), it provides the bandwidth and resilience you need to drive digital transformation and grow the digital capabilities of your organisation.
Vital security services are included as part of your Janet IP connection, adding Jisc’s technical expertise to your in-house resource to protect your organisation, students and staff from threat actors and their extensive resources and ever-evolving tactics.
As a member, you’ll also have access to our cyber security community, a closed group of cyber experts from across UK education and research providing the latest threat intelligence, workshops and opportunities to hear the experiences of peers.
Research
As provider of the UK’s NREN, we provide the foundational digital infrastructure on which UK research runs. From this unique position and in collaboration with sector partners such as UKRI, we work across the sector to advance trusted, secure and sustainable research, such as in our report on mapping federation journeys for optimising the UK digital research infrastructure.
We provide services specially designed to further support your research activities from policy compliance, to cost management, to the discovery, use and impact of your research repository and equipment.
Libraries
Meanwhile, we work hand-in-hand with university library leaders every day to negotiate fair, equitable deals for digital content agreements on our licence subscriptions manager that support your university’s academic research.
Together with our licensing strategic and expert groups, we save the sector millions of pounds each year while leading the charge in removing barriers to accessing research outputs and increasing the sector’s financial sustainability.
We also work with the sector to support the management of unique aggregations of data about the library and archival collections of universities across the UK.
Learning and teaching
We champion digital innovation for more inclusive student experiences and better outcomes in learning, teaching and assessment.
As a member, you get access to the latest intelligence, resources and services to support the transformation of digital practice in higher education.
Our learning and teaching communities are thriving spaces available exclusively to members. Experts like you from across the UK come together online, in-person, and at our sector-leading events to share good practice and overcome challenges together.
Our artificial intelligence team of experts combined with an artificial intelligence community of more than 2,000 of your teaching and learning peers are breaking new ground with the effective, responsible use of AI.
Data
We are the designated data body for higher education in England and trusted data partner across the whole of the UK. Our role is to provide you with the tools, insights and expertise you need to harness data analytics to drive informed decision-making.
The make-up of our data services includes a range of sector insights to help you benchmark and plan, alongside a comprehensive learning analytics platform designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, and tools to uncover data from within your own organisation.
Finance and procurement
Working with carefully selected suppliers, we develop compliant framework agreements and dynamic purchasing systems across services for cloud, connectivity, library and open research. These are available exclusively to members, saving you time and money plus giving you assurance that the solutions are legally compliant and the terms are negotiated with members like you in mind.
Jisc’s negotiation and licensing strategic groups set the direction of negotiations and ensure that our member’s requirements are heard. Working in partnership with these groups enables us to negotiate affordable agreements to save you time and money.
We negotiate with academic publishers and software vendors at a national level to license and procure affordable digital content on our licence subscriptions manager and software via Chest for the UK education and research community.
How we are funded
The majority of our funding comes from the UK HE and FE funding bodies, with a contribution via subscription from all higher education institutions and from general FE and sixth form colleges in England. The UK HE funding bodies contribute the majority (at least 75%) of the cost required to deliver our core package of services to HE institutions. The amount that each funding body contributes differs because of the particular funding context in their country. Though contributions differ by country, the included services are the same for all HE members.
Research and development are fully funded by the funding bodies. The funding bodies will also provide significant and additional capital investment
Invoicing for your subscription
We will contact your institution directly in the spring each year to outline its exact contribution, which is based on student numbers and income. You will receive your invoice for your subscription fee in August. We appreciate you need these costs to assist your budget planning and will aim to get them to you as soon as possible.
Calculating each HE institution's contribution
The model for calculating how the charges are shared between HE institutions reflect the value of Jisc to different types of institution. The model is the same in all parts of the UK. In the example below an English institution is used for illustrative purposes only.
[ ((Income/total HE income for England) x 0.8) + ((Research income/total research income for England) x 0.1) + ((Student full-time equivalent/total student full-time equivalents in England) x 0.1) ]
x Total HE England institutional contribution
= Institutional contribution