In addition to the renewal of significant agreements with Blackwell Publishing and Oxford University Press, brand new agreements were concluded with AAAS for Science Online, The American Chemical Society, The British Psychological Society, BMJ Publishing Group, Cell Press, The Institute of Physics and Sage. These agreements will mean considerable savings for the education and research communities through the lower cost of journals secured through national negotiations.

This successful second round of negotiations follows the launch of NESLi2 in 2003 and the nine publisher agreements concluded for 2004. The 2004 agreements with publishers saved the higher and further education community over £3m and the 2005 agreements will yield further savings. In total, over 4,600 online journals are now available to subscribing institutions in the UK academic community as a result of NESLi2 agreements, which have been handled by JISC's appointed negotiation agent, Content Complete Ltd.

Lorraine Estelle, Collections Manager at JISC said: 'We are delighted to have completed another successful round of negotiations on behalf of our institutions. We now have many of the world's leading scholarly publishers working with us in NESLi2 and value their participation and willingness to try and accommodate our requirements'.

Dr Tom Graham, Librarian at the University of Newcastle and Chair of JISC's Journals Working Group said: ' NESLi2 was introduced after a review of previous methods of handling national negotiations. It is clear to the Working Group that the first two years of working in this way has led to significant improvements in the work of obtaining access to the output of major journal publishers for the academic community, with many benefits to our staff and students. We look forward to continuing this progress in negotiations for 2006.'

The list of publishers to be included in discussions for 2006 has recently been finalised, with negotiations commencing in mid-March.

Related links to this article:

Joint Information Systems Committee [1]

e-Government National Awards 2004: Winners were announced on 19th January

The e-Government National Awards (www.e-GovernmentAwards.org.uk [2]) recognise and praise the best strategies, achievements, teams and individuals in UK e-Government. The guest of honour at the 2004 Awards dinner was Ian Watmore, head of e-Government at the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit.

Full details on winners can be found at this link. [3]

A gallery of photos of Awards winners and the dinner can be found at this link. [4]

Organiser for the awards was PublicTechnology.net, the leading online news provider for those in UK e-Government and public sector IT, with 29,300+ readers per month. The Awards were supported by the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit [5] and Socitm [6]. Platinum sponsor was Intel [7] and also a sponsor was Jobsgopublic [8].