August
It is announced that JISC, as part of a 9-strong group of UK research funders, is jointly funding UK PubMed Central which will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.
More than three quarters of all UK colleges and universities consider open source options when engaging in IT procurement exercises, says a published report undertaken by the JISC-funded OSS Watch service.
JISC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announce a major new call for bids for research grants in the area of e-Science for the Arts and Humanities. 
September
The JISC-funded SHERPA partnership, based at the University of Nottingham, announces that OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, has surveyed over 1000 candidate sites worldwide for inclusion in its list, providing a far higher quality assurance than results gathered by automatic harvesting.
Over 500 hundred people respond to a consultation designed to help inform decisions concerning around £4m of investment in the digitisation of unique scholarly resources.
JISC is a sponsor of the All Hands conference in Nottingham, which showcases a range of e-Science projects, from blue-skies research to industrial take-up of prototype technologies.
October
JISC launches its new website. The new site incorporates a number of significant improvements developed on the basis of extensive usability testing.
Delegates at a major conference organised by JISC hear Director General of CERN Dr Robert Aymar say that the time is right to move to open access. The invitation-only event, held in Oxford, attracts senior figures from research, publishing, funding and library communities from the UK and around the world.
In an exclusive interview with JISC inform, Sir Keith O’Nions, Director General for Science and Innovation at the DTI, says that the UK’s e-Science activities have a vital role to play in helping to maintain the UK’s global leadership in science and innovation.
SuperJANET5, the upgrade to the JISC-funded JANET network, is launched at an event in London. The newly enhanced network for UK education and research has a potential user base of some 18 million people across all UK education and research sectors.
November
SURF and JISC publish a model agreement to help authors make appropriate arrangements with publishers for the publication of a journal article. The 'Licence to Publish' - the result of several years of international consultation - aims to establish a balance of rights and interests in the emerging scholarly communications environment.
JISC and Becta announce the launch of the UK Access Management Federation. The centrepiece of JISC and Becta's significant investment in developing and implementing next generation access management systems, the Federation brings the UK education and research sectors a step closer to achieving single sign-on to network and online resources.
JISC announces the successful bids under the first round of funding in its capital programme. Representing an investment of nearly £5.5m, the 27 projects are being funded under the e-learning, e-infrastructure and repositories and preservation strands of the £84m programme.
December
JISC welcomes the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, published by the Treasury, which provides a review and evaluation of the issue of intellectual property (IP) in the digital age. In particular JISC welcomes its insistence on the need for flexibility in IP regimes and its emphasis on the vital importance of the education sector to the UK’s knowledge economy.
Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, then Chancellor of the University of Sunderland, presents the JISC Regional Support Centre Northern e-learning awards at an event in Newcastle to recognise the achievements of those who have used ICT to support innovation in e-learning in the Northern region.
Nearly a third of further and higher institutions in the UK do not have formalised policies governing staff access to ICT. This is one of the findings of a JISC-funded report which explores the restrictions on access to ICT by staff in FE and HE and the impact of such restrictions both on individuals and the institutions which employ them.
January
JISC publishes its updated strategy [2007-09] which reaffirms its commitment to the support of institutions in realising their goals in the digital age while broadening its focus to include for the first time the support of institutions’ activities to engage with business and the community.
A major new resource, which for the first time makes freely available all British census reports from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is launched. The Online Historical Populations Reports gives a picture of Britain’s changing population from 1800 up to the Second World War, making available almost 200,000 pages of digitised reports and data.
For every £1 spent on the JISC services budget, the UK education and research community receives £9 of demonstrable value, says a newly-published value for money report commissioned by JISC. The report also reveals that for every £1 spent on securing national agreements for online resources, the savings amount to more than £26.
JISC is among a group of European organisations which launch a petition to the European Commission calling on it to support public access to research outputs shortly after their publication. Within a month, Nobel laureates Peter Agre, Martinus Veltman, and Harold Varmus, and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, will have joined more than 20,000 individuals and nearly 750 education, research and cultural organisations from around the world to have added their weight to the petition.
In an exclusive interview with JISC inform, the new CEO of HEFCE, Professor David Eastwood, praises JISC’s work in support of UK education and research: ‘Imagine the world without JISC. We simply wouldn’t be able to compete, we wouldn’t have the structure, the platform… And we wouldn’t have the edge which having JISC means we have.’
JISC announces the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources. The 16 successful bids are made by consortia which include nearly 60 organisations from education and other sectors, including the British Film Institute, The National Archive, the BBC, ITN, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and the Bodleian Library, alongside nearly 30 universities.
February
A new animation, developed by JISC, explains the key elements of a ‘service oriented approach’ to the development of flexible IT services and its application to education and research. The animation introduces the international e-Framework initiative and explains how it seeks to support UK colleges and universities.
Maintaining the UK’s world leadership in research and innovation requires a national e-infrastructure capable of meeting the needs of researchers in the digital age, says a major report produced by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) e-Infrastructure Working Group. The working group, made up of JISC and national partners, calls for greater investment in national e-infrastructure development.
International licensing agreements move a step closer with the announcement that Knowledge Exchange – an umbrella organisation of four national ICT bodies including JISC – is beginning a multinational tender process to explore with publishers the possibility of cross-border licensing arrangements for online resources.
March
A new report by the JISC-funded TechWatch service investigates the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon, the umbrella term which refers to the new interactive web services such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking. What is Web 2.0? - which explores the implications of these services for UK further and higher education - attracts international attention, receiving tens of thousands of hits from around the world.
JISC and CURL (Consortium of University and Research Libraries) announce that they are funding a project to widen access to electronic theses. EThOSnet will lead to a live service which will make UK theses openly available for global use and provide an international showcase for some of the best of UK research.
Over 600 delegates gather at the Birmingham ICC for JISC’s annual conference to listen to presentations, attend workshops and visit the more than 50 stands in the exhibition hall. Keynote speeches are delivered by Professor David Eastwood, CEO of HEFCE, and Tom Loosemore, project director of BBC 2.0.
Information services for the UK’s research community receive a significant boost with the signing of an agreement between JISC and the Research Councils. The agreement promises to strengthen cooperation and ensure that the research community has access to improved services, such as increased network bandwidth.
Over 80 projects are awarded a total of more than £15m funding in the latest round of funding under JISC's capital programme. The projects are funded under e-learning, repositories and preservation, e-infrastructure, users and innovation, and e-research strands of the overarching programme.
April
The JISC-funded SHERPA partnership is awarded the prestigious SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. The award, presented at a conference at the CERN Laboratories in Geneva, recognises the work of ‘an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications.’
The Community of Practice is launched, set up as part of JISC’s Users and Innovation programme. The Community is made up over 150 individuals across more than 50 institutions, mainly from the UK, but also from universities in Australia and New Zealand.
May
The Times Higher Education Supplement announces that JISC is sponsoring an award which will showcase the most innovative ICT initiatives across the UK. The award, one of the Times Higher’s 2007 Awards, will ‘recognise and reward an institutional ICT initiative which has demonstrated an innovat
ive and strategic use of ICT in support of the goals of that institution.’
Lord Rix - the former actor-manager Brian Rix, now Chancellor of the University of East London – launches a new JISC-funded digitisation project which will capture and preserve important resources from the history of theatre. The East London Theatre Archive is, says Lord Rix, ‘destined to become a resource of national and international importance.’
A new publication from JISC TechDis, the UK's leading educational advisers in the fields of inclusion and accessibility, highlights the ways in which independent Specialist Colleges are progressing opportunities for disabled people in higher, further and adult education.
June
The Depot, a national repository open to all UK authors to submit their research into, is launched at a major repositories conference in Manchester. At the same conference, Professor Drummond Bone, President of Universities UK, praises JISC’s work to establish and develop institutional repositories across the UK.
The JISC online conference, Innovating e-Learning 2007, attracts delegates from around the world and for the first time hosts a session in the virtual reality environment, Second Life.
JISCPAS, the national plagiarism advisory service, publishes widely-praised research which indicates that the regulations that recommend penalties for plagiarism among higher education institutions (HEIs) vary substantially throughout the UK.
The role of the 9 JISC Regional Support Centres in England expands to include the Work Based Learning sector, part of the ongoing strategy of the Learning and Skills Council to extend e-learning across all of the post-16 sectors.
July
The UK Data Archive, funded by JISC and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), celebrates its 40th anniversary at a special reception in the House of Commons.
Elsevier becomes the first major publisher to announce that it has joined the UK Access Management Federation. Implementation of Shibboleth technologies means that users will have simplified access to ScienceDirect, which provides more than a quarter of the world’s scientific, medical and technical information online.
Senior figures from around the world gather in Cardiff for an international digitisation conference, organised and hosted by JISC. The 2-day event is opened by Carwyn Jones, Wale's Leader of the House.