English-Corpora.org

1. After you fill out a short form to initiate the process of obtaining a license, it will generate an invoice that you can submit to your university.

2. Purchase orders: Sorry, we do not accept purchase orders. The license is only valid once payment is actually made.

3. Vendor agreements and W-9 (US): We can fill out vendor forms (registering as a vendor for your university or university) or W-9's, but there will be an extra fee of $150 / hour for us to fill these out. In addition, it may delay things by several working days.

The bottom line is that things work the best if your university 1) can pay via credit card at PayPal (rather than via wire transfer) and 2) doesn't require us to fill out a lot of forms. This is how things work for more than 95% of all academic licenses. Please check (again) with your university, if they insist that all of these forms are really necessary.

Managing a license (for administrators)

Once the license is paid for, you will be sent a link to manage the license. You will see information on your license ( 1  below), and you can specify a range of IP addresses for the users ( 2 ). If you want people to be able to use the license off-campus, then you will need to have someone set up proxy server access as well, and then you will simply add that IP address in ( 2 ). You can also see a list of all users of the license ( 3 ) -- by email address and showing the number of days that each person has used the corpora (for whatever time period you specify).

Proxy server access (Optional. You don't need to use a proxy server if everyone will always be connecting from on campus)

Once every 365 days, users of the corpora will need to "authenticate" that they are part of the academic license from your university, by logging in to a corpus (using any of their devices) from on campus. However, this is sometimes difficult to do, especially when people are off-campus due to COVID or for other reasons.

Fortunately, it is also possible for them to authenticate the license by logging on at your university from off-campus through a proxy server .

Almost every university library has someone who is already in charge of the proxy server, and they will have already been using it for many other resources. So this is something that you need to do on your end; there is nothing that we can do to set up the proxy server on your campus.

In very brief terms, this is how a proxy server works:

1. Your tech people install the proxy server software on a computer on campus, usually at the library. A free and easy program to use is EZProxy.

2. They will create a link for English-Corpora.org at your university's website, and when users click on this, they will be prompted to provide their university credentials (username and password). These are the credentials that they would use for anything else at your university, and they have nothing at all to do with English-Corpora.org or their account here.

3. Once the proxy server sees that they are "authenticated" at your university (because of their university credentials), it changes their IP address (which is from off-campus, e.g. their mobile phone provider) to look like an IP address from on campus.

4. When users connect, English-Corpora.org thinks that they are from on campus at your university, even though they aren't (because of the "university" IP address that they are now using from the proxy server).

As the corpus administrator, the only thing you should have to do is to enter the IP address of the proxy server via the management page (#2 on that page), and tell the people in charge that users will connect to the corpora via https://www.english-corpora.org/. The "tech people" at your university (library) should be able to do the rest.

Do individuals still need to log in with their own account?

Yes, individual users need to create an account and log on to the corpora to use them. Creating an account takes less than one minute and (depending on how you have things set up in your browser), you may never have to actually log in after the first time. (Many people have their browser remembers their password, and then logs them in automatically.)

Why have individual accounts, even if it's part of an academic license? It's because individual users can create Virtual Corpora, customized wordlists, lists of "favorite" words (from the Word display page), save their own texts for keyword analysis, and much more. In addition, users have access to a history of all of their searches, so that they can search through these, annotate them, re-run them, and share them with others (one click for others to see the same corpus data). The only way that it is possible to save all of this information for individual users is if they create their own account and then log in under that account, so that everything can be saved for them as an individual.

30 person vs unlimited license

Universities can obtain a license for an unlimited number of users (the typical case) or (in rare cases) for just 30 users. In many cases, universities have found that the 30 person license that they have purchased is not sufficient.

Before purchasing a 30 person license, you will need to send a short email to us, confirming that you have read the following explanation, and that you understand the limitations of a 30 person license.

The two examples below show how a (limited) 30 person license would work.

Authentication FAQ (for administrators)

1. If we haven't yet set up the IP addresses (and/or proxy server) yet for our license, will users of the license lose access to the corpora?

No. Users will still be able to use the corpora -- just without the advantages of an academic license. The two main differences for users will be that:

• They will have fewer queries per day -- but still 200 queries per day for "researchers" and 50 queries per day for others.

• They will see the "notices" every 10-15 queries, asking if they want to have a premium license (or an academic license).

2. What about classes?

This is the one other big difference that users might notice. There is a limit of about 250 queries per day for a class and after that, any searches from the class are blocked. But this shouldn't be too much of a problem, because:

• If the users are on-campus (assuming that you have set up the IP addresses correctly), they will automatically be "authenticated" for the next 365 days, and so they won't be blocked.

• If they are connected via proxy server, they won't be at the same (or similar) IP address, and so they won't get blocked for having more than 250 queries as a group (even without the license).

Of course for universities that don't have a license, their classes will be blocked in both of these cases, because there are no IP addresses for on-campus or proxy server access.

3. How have you determined whether a user logged in from on-campus (or via proxy server) in the last 365 days?

We log every query that a user does (unless they delete them). We ran database queries to match corpus user, IP address, and date to log any query that any user (from a university with a license) did in the past year (since 15 Oct 2020) -- hundreds of thousands of queries.

4. How do we add / change IP addresses (for example, after adding proxy server access, or IP addresses for on-campus use)?

The administrator should have the URL to manage your license, and you can easily add, change, and delete IP addresses there (#2). It takes just a few seconds, and it automatically takes effect for users of the license. Contact us if you have misplaced the URL for your management page.

5. Can you help us with setting up proxy server access?

Unfortunately no -- this is something that has to be done or your end. Virtually every university has someone at the library who is very familiar with how to do this, and it should only take them 5-10 minutes at most.

6. Is there any way to provide users with "emergency" access to the license, if we're having temporary problems with IP addresses and proxy servers?

Yes -- please see this page. Please note, however, that this can only be used five times, and that it lasts for just one week.

We're sorry if it has taken you a little bit of work to get things ready for authentication. We notified all administrators for the academic licenses in mid-September 2021 to let them know about the changes that would take place on 15 October 2021, and it only takes 2-3 minutes to change / add IP addresses, or 5-10 minutes to set up access via a proxy server.

And more importantly, by using IP addresses for authentication (rather than passwords, as could be done previously), this brings us in line with the way that virtually every other online database works (ProQuest, Lexis-Nexis, Oxford English Dictionary, etc).

Thanks for your understanding.

Joining a license (for end users, not corpus administrators)

1. Important: From the profile page ( after logging in to any corpus), make sure you have selected the university whose license you want to join. For example:

Institution

Your University Name Here (City, Country)   (change)

Click on (Change) to change to your university, if necessary. The important point is that you cannot join the license for University X if you have not first selected University X. You only have to do this once.

2. Check on this page to see if it recognizes your IP address as belonging to the academic license. It should show the following in green:

You are a member of the academic license for [Name of Your University ], and this license expires in [ ... ] days.

If it doesn't, then 1) you're not on campus AND 2) the administrator for the academic license has not yet set up proxy access, OR 3) the administrator has not entered the right IP addresses for your university. You will need to contact the administrator of the license at your university to fix #2 or #3 -- we can't change that from our end.

3. If #1-2 are OK, when you log in and look at your profile (), you should see a message that says the following (followed the date on which the license ends).

Status / License

You are part of the academic license for your university, which will expire on...

In addition, the "person icon" () will turn to green, and it will say  +AUTHENTICATION  on the main search page.

IMPORTANT: Please remember that you will need to authenticate that you are from your university, by logging on from on campus or via a proxy server at your university, once every 365 days.
 

Problems with academic license (for end users)

1. Check on this page to see if it recognizes your IP address as belonging to the academic license. It should show the following in green:

You are a member of the academic license for [Name of Your University ], and this license expires in [ ... ] days.

If it doesn't, then 1) you're not on campus AND 2) the administrator for the academic license has not yet set up proxy access, OR 3) the administrator has not entered the right IP addresses for your university. You will need to contact the administrator of the license at your university to fix #2 or #3 -- we can't change that from our end.

2. As you use the corpora, if you see any messages asking you to upgrade to a premium account, or saying that your class has done too many queries, then check again to see if somehow it's not recognizing your IP address. If that's still OK, then your session may have "timed out" after half an hour of inactivity. Go back to the portal page, click on a corpus, and start over (including logging in).

3. If you see a message that you've done too many queries, even after successfully logging in to the academic license, please have your teacher visit this page, and then send the requested information to us.

Authentication

Once every 365 days, users must prove that they are actually at the university that they have selected, in order to be part of the academic license. (Why?)

Note that you can still use the corpus even without being part of the academic license, but there will be some limitations. For example, you will have fewer searches per day, and every 10-15 searches you will be asked if you want to get a premium license (or academic license).

You can prove that you are from the university (i.e. "authenticate") in one of three ways:

If none of these methods is possible, you can of course just get a premium license for yourself, and not worry about the university-wide academic license. Or, as was mentioned above, you can just use the corpora without any license at all, although there will be some limitations.

Temporary access

A. Log on to the corpora from the campus of that university, or
B. Log on to the corpora using a proxy server that has been set up by your university.

In either case, this “authentication” will last 365 days.

However, there is a third, temporary method of authentication. This might be useful, for example, at the beginning of the semester, when some students are off-campus (and thus can’t do #1), and the proxy server (#2) isn’t set up yet at your university. In this case, there are two steps to gain temporary authentication:

1. A teacher from the university provides temporary access to authentication, and then
2. The students use that temporary access

This will provide access for just 7 days, after which you will need to do (A) or (B) above. In addition, this temporary access can only be used a total of five times, among all teachers at the university.

The following are the steps to provide and use temporary authentication:

	Teacher: provide access	Student: use access
1	Click on the “person” icon at the top of the corpus to see the profile (1)	(Same)
2	Click on “More information on authentication” in the Status/license row (2)	(Same)
3	On the next page, click on CREATE ACCESS	On the next page, click on USE ACCESS
4	It will show your name, and when the temporary authentication started	Click on teacher’s name to use the temporary authentication
Notes	(1) Teachers need to have Level 3 access (see [Level] row) (2) For teachers who have authenticated in the last 365 days, it will be in the “Authentication” row

Again, you will need to authenticate the academic license via the normal means (by logging in from on campus or via proxy server) in order to have access to the academic license for the next 365 days, rather than just 7 days.