JISC's Committee on Electronic Information warmly supports the SPARC initiative to promote new low-cost scholarly journals.
The mission of the JISC <www.jisc.ac.uk> is to stimulate and enable the cost effective exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils communities.
It is JISC's responsibility to acquire high quality digital content on behalf o the Uk higher education community.
JISC's official negotiator for full text electronic journals is the NESLi Managing Agent. NESLI, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative, is a JISC service established to promote the widespread delivery and use of electronic journals in the UK higher education community. NESLI is an initiative to address the many issues which at present hinder the acquisition, access and management of electronic journals in the academic library community. Fundamental to NESLI is offering libraries the choice to purchase electrnoic journals as a separate product from the traditional print journal. More information about NESLI is available at <www.nesli.ac.uk>
We warmly endorse SPARC's efforts to achieve greater value for libraries by providing alteratives to conventional high-priced journals. Faced with escalating prices of conventional journals, both SPARC and NESLI have the objective of securing better value for academic libraries from their purchase of journal literature.