What are Chest Agreements?

Chest Agreements are the result of a series of negotiations between Eduserv, the academic community and suppliers and resellers of software and data products.

Eduserv responds to requests from the higher and further education community for access to software and data resources for their institutions. We then negotiate with data publishers and software suppliers to agree preferential terms and conditions for an agreement (this is the Chest Agreement).

For suppliers this means a wide reach into the large academic community and because Eduserv processes all the licence requests and payments, reduced administrative costs.

For the hundreds of higher and further education institutions that take advantage of Chest Agreements, this means licences that frequently save large amounts of money and terms and conditions that reflect the special needs that they often have, such as usage rights for visiting academics and students.

Currently Eduserv manages nearly over 60 agreements with over 3,000 licences covering:

• Desktop software
• Graphics products
• 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
• eBooks
• Learning materials
  

View a list of all our software and data agreements.

Find out about becoming a supplier.

Make a wish for a data or software agreement.

What are the savings to community?

Using a methodology that’s been approved by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, we are able to estimate that Chest Agreements have saved the academic community a collective £28 million in the cost of software and data products in the year to date (figures for September 2009).

The method used to calculate the savings compares the prices available under the Chest Agreements with the prices otherwise payable outside the agreements. Eduserv obtains these prices from the suppliers and other sources. HEFCE have verified some of these by contacting the sales offices of some suppliers directly. Included in the savings is an estimate of the process time saved by institutions by not having to undertake negotiations.

Our history

In the 1980s the Combined Higher Education Software Team was formed by a group of universities to negotiate preferential terms and conditions for software licences used by universities. The CHEST team were based at the University of Bath, where the Athens service was also developed in the 1990s. In 1999 the not-for-profit group Eduserv was formed from these services, which now included web development and hosting for the public sector.

As the needs of education have developed, so has remit of our Licence Negotiation Services. We have extended our activities to include data products and services, and to other academic institutions. Currently all HE institutions, over 75 per cent of FE colleges, other European institutions and a few schools in the UK are participating in at least one agreement.

If you'd like to know more about any aspect of our Licence Negotiation Service, please contact us.