Taking advantage of its membership in NERCOMP, the NorthEast Regional Computing Program, ETS (Enterprise Technology Services) recently signed a new license agreement with SPSS, Inc.  NERCOMP has an arrangement with SPSS that provides substantial licensing discounts to member institutions.  Our new license allows unlimited usage of SPSS by UVM faculty, staff, and students on any university-owned computers, as well as on personally-owned computers.

This license gives us with the latest releases of SPSS for both Windows and Mac OS X computers.  However, the current version of SPSS for Mac OS X (version 13) will install only on PowerPC Macs.  Version 16 for both Windows and Mac OS X is scheduled for release later this year.  The Mac version will be a Universal Binary.

Although there was a nominal charge to faculty and staff for SPSS in the past, usage of SPSS under this new license is free to all university faculty, staff, and students.  SPSS for Windows and for Mac OS X can be downloaded from the software web site (https://www.uvm.edu/software/).

Our previous license explicitly prohibited usage by students on their own computers.  The new license allows for student use, so faculty who were reluctant in the past to use SPSS in classroom instruction because of this limitation can now recommend or require SPSS use in their courses.  Graduate students who were purchasing or leasing the SPSS Grad Pack for their graduate research will no longer need to do so.

In addition to SPSS Base, Regression Models, Advanced Models, and Tables, two new SPSS modules are now included that were not previously licensed: Trends (procedures for analyzing time series data) and Categories (procedures for analyzing categorical data).  However, a program that was previously licensed, AMOS (for structural equations modeling), is not included in this new license agreement.

Thanks to David Todd for approving and signing this new license to provide SPSS to all faculty, staff, and students.  Any questions should be directed to me, at the e-mail address or phone number given below.

--

Alan B. Howard - Academic Computing Services
L407 Lafayette - 94 University Place
University of Vermont - Burlington, VT  05405-0114
abh@uvm.edu - (802)656-2009