English-Corpora.org

Academic license: Frequently asked questions

1. What benefits does our university (or organization) get from an academic license?
2. How is use limited to people from our university?
3. Do users still need to first log on to their own individual account before using the corpora?
4. How do you count the number of distinct users for a license?
 

1. There are three main advantages of having an academic license.
-- Each user will have more queries per day -- 200 for students (compared to the normal limit of 50) and 400 for faculty (compared to the normal limit of 200).
-- Users will not see the messages that appear every 10-15 queries, asking them to contribute.
-- Most importantly, the normal daily limit of queries (250) for a class or department is waived, so that the corpora can be used as a integral part of classroom activities.

2. There are two ways to limit use to people from your university. You can use either or both of these methods.
-- The preferred method is by IP address. You can specify blocks of IP addresses (e.g. 123.45.*.* or 123.45.67.0-123.45.67.127) for on-campus users from your university, and you can also enter the IP address for your proxy server(s), for off-campus access.
-- The second method is by password. You specify a password for all users from your university, and after logging in with their own individual account, they enter the name of the university and the "group" password (just once, and then it remembers this for all future visits).

3. Yes, users need to first log on to their own individual account (this account is free and takes just 30-40 seconds to set up). The main reason for this is that we need to know how many users are coming from each university, and the only way to determine this is by having people log in with their own individual account. If they are using IP-based access, there is nothing that they themselves need to do after logging on to their individual account. If they are using the "group password" method, they will need to enter that information (just once; more information).

4. Universities can obtain a license for 30 users, or an unlimited number of users.
-- For IP-based logins, it it is the total number of distinct users from the specified IP addresses in during the period of the license.
-- For password-based logins, it is the total number of distinct users who have "joined" the license via a password, who log in during the period of the license.