It has been nurtured in the arms of various universities, principally Bath, but after more than ten years it has come of age. It appears sensible to place it in a legal regime which is not influenced by or tied to any one HE institution. The organisation can be more easily supervised and monitored if it is financially separate and accountable. There is a stable, highly skilled and experienced team committed to working for the education community. In practice, usage may well be limited by server capacity or some ceiling on the number of concurrent users.
Price is an annual fee known and fixed for the whole period of the agreement.
In many agreements, there is provision for users to buy personal copies at a low price. Some agreements may be free of charge as a benefit to the community. The JISC datasets grant reimburses the negotiation and management costs in those dataset deals that JISC has commissioned. These are agreements which enable the community to buy at discounts that apply to the total volume of business, not just the volume of an individual institution. Agreed discount levels and other conditions with the publisher.