Legal deposit of digital publications

Legal deposit is an obligation to deposit publications with specified depositories. The purpose of legal deposit is to preserve and provide long-term access to the national intellectual heritage. Extending legal deposit to digital publications presents many challenges for the framing of legislation, selection and acquisition of material, preservation and provision of access. The aim of this research was to: explore the potential issues related to the extension of UK legal deposit to digital publications and identify the implications for existing legal deposit arrangements. The research was based on Soft Systems Methodology. Data was gathered through two rounds of interviews with stakeholder groups, including legal deposit libraries, publishers, government and technical experts. Preservation is accepted as the main purpose of legal deposit, but there is some tension and lack of trust between publishers and legal deposit libraries on access to legal deposit collections. The new UK legal deposit law is enabling only; implementation will require further regulations that will be subject to detailed consultation and negotiation. While there has been a voluntary scheme in place for some time in the UK, the research found a lack of readiness amongst the UK legal deposit libraries. They still had to develop cooperative arrangements between themselves and publishers; policies, procedures, especially for online publications; and did not have all the necessary technical infrastructure in place. The deposit of digital publications is an extra role for legal deposit libraries and it is not clear that they will receive extra funding, as is the case in some other countries. There is currently no full-scale fully functional digital legal deposit system in the world. However, there are lessons to be learned from other legal deposit libraries and research and development work is providing partial solutions. The key issues are the need for communication and collaboration between UK legal deposit libraries and cooperation and trust between legal deposit libraries and publishers. Developments since the research was carried out demonstrate some progress in this. Without these, digital legal deposit cannot be successfully implemented in the UK. There is also a need to look at what the users require in terms to material collected and how it is preserved

Towards a competitive and sustainable OA market in Europe - A study of the open access market and policy environment

Deliverable 5.3 of OpenAIRE WP5: FP7 Post Grant Gold Open Access Pilot. This deliverable consists of a study and an annex - and it will be supplemented by a roadmap in May 2017. This study considers the economic factors contributing to the current state of the open-access publishing market, and evaluates the potential for European policymakers to enhance market competition and sustainability in parallel to increasing access. It was commissioned within the scope of the OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, and it will be accompanied by a Roadmap document developed with inputs from an expert workshop to be held in The Hague on 20 April 2017. In accordance with the project brief, the study aims to: Explore the current status of the OA publishing market Analyse existing OA publishing business models Evaluate how different national and international policies are complementing each other as a means to achieve a transition to OA Evaluate the impact of the Framework Programme 7 Post-grant OA pilot and its implications for future similar initiatives and the transition to OA. Provide a roadmap leading to a sustainable and competitive market The transition to open access concerns all kinds of academic research outputs, including monographs, journal articles, and data. This study focuses on open access to peer-reviewed research articles, which constitute the bulk of the market and the primary mechanism through which research is disseminated across disciplinary communities and beyond. This report is supplemented by an Annex containing a mid-term evaluation of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot.This report will be accompanied by a Roadmap document developed with inputs from an expert workshop to be held in The Hague on 20 April 201

Navigating Copyright for Libraries

Much of the information that libraries make available is protected by copyright or subject to the terms of license agreements. This reader presents an overview of current issues in copyright law reform. The chapters present salient points, overviews of the law and legal concepts, selected comparisons of approaches around the world, significance of the topic, and opportunities for reform, advocacy, and other related resources

Our place in politics:Urban-rural political divergence and how place affects political attitudes

Several consequential elections across advanced industrialized democracies have sparked the idea of a revival of urban-rural political divides, supported by empirical evidence from primarily the US and other majoritarian democracies. This geographic divergence is argued to have important consequences for the functioning of these democracies, but we currently lack understanding of how these divides, and their underlying explanations, compare to countries with other political-institutional contexts. In this dissertation I first broaden the perspective by comparing urban-rural political divergence in election outcomes across a large group of Western democracies over a period of five decades. Second, I show in the specific context of the Netherlands how political attitudes of inhabitants of more- and less-urbanised areas have evolved over the last decades. Third, I show to what extent, and how, place affects political attitudes of inhabitants, by focusing on the interplay between objective spatial inequalities and perceptions of these economic, cultural and political inequalities between places

The Tobacco Epidemic in South-East Europe: Consequences and Policy Responses. Health, Nutrition and Population Discussion Paper

Smoking is the single largest cause of premature mortality in the developed world. Obtaining accurate estimates of smoking's impacts in south east Europe (SEE) is hindered by the lack of accurate data.. None of the countries of the region yet conduct regular national surveys of adult smoking prevalence and some have no recent nationally representative data available. The very high rates among medical personnel are cause for concern. Youth smoking surveys are now conducted in most countries as part of international projects and show rates broadly similar to the EU. The collapse of communism and the end of the conflicts in the 1990s has led to major changes in the region's tobacco industry. The previously state-owned tobacco monopolies have either undergone or are undergoing privatization and the transnational tobacco companies have been increasingly active both in importing their cigarettes to, and investing in, the region. These changes can be expected to increase competition in the tobacco industry which will in turn drive down prices and increase advertising, thereby stimulating consumption. The available statistics, combined with the changes to the region's tobacco industry, suggest that the health impacts of tobacco in SEE will continue to worsen over coming years

Theory and practice in the analysis of information policy in the digital age: a casestudy on the formulation of the European Directive on the legal protection of databases.

This thesis is concerned with the academic study of information policy and aims to improve theoretical and methodological approaches for the analysis of complex information policy environments. In conducting a casestudy on the formulation of the European directive on the legal protection of databases. up to its adoption in March 1996. the research aims to explore the ways in which copyright and information issues were framed. and solutions shaped by the process of formulating policy responses to them at the European level. At the substantive level the research examines the legal issues arising in the protection of databases in Europe and describes and explains the role of human. organisational and contextual factors in shaping the content of the directive as finally adopted. At the methodological level the research examines the utility of a re-interpreted process model of policy-making for providing a coherent framework within which to conduct analysis of this complex information policy issue. At the theoretical level the research aims to use the casestudy findings to generate insights for the academic study of complex (European) information policy environments. The literature review begins by examining the development of information policy and considers the main problems that have inhibited the development of a coherent approach to information policy studies from within the information science tradition. It examines the reinterpreted process model of policy-making and presents it as a heuristic device with which to conduct the casestudy. The literature review also examines in detail the development of copyright policy at the European level and identifies the expansion of protection that has taken place. In particular. the impact of digital information and communication technologies on copyright regimes is considered. The literature review also outlines the emergence of the European Union(EU). and considers how the EU has shaped the characteristics of. and interactions between policy actors operating in the European policy-making environment. The casestudy analysis is conducted in two parts consisting of a detailed analysis of documentary evidence and forty in-depth semi-structured interviews with policy actors directly involved in the formulation of the directive. In deploying the re-interpreted process model the analysis is divided into two overlapping phases linked by the publication of the Commission's formal directive proposal in 1992. To ensure that the casestudy findings can be used in a more generalisable manner the analysis addresses the links between the formulation of the database directive and the wider context of European copyright and information policy-making in the digital age. Following the documentary and interview analysis the research findings are discussed and interpreted. The thesis concludes that at a substantive level the formulation of European copyright policy is problematic and tends towards a strengthening of protection in favour of right shoulders. In the digital environment the implications of this for other areas of information policy are also shown to be of concern. At the methodological level the re-interpreted process model is highlighted as useful in sensitising analysis to sources of complexity in the formulation process and for providing a coherent framework within which to study them. At the theoretical level the thesis enhances understanding of (European) information policy processes and provides some useful insights for academic information policy studies

A strategic perspective on the emergence and evolution of e-Banking in Saudi Arabia

The aim of the thesis is to look at the emergence and evolution of e-banking in Saudi Arabia, with particular emphasis on the processes of how banks implement e-banking to build their capabilities and create new value strategies. The research process focuses on understanding (1) how banks implement e-banking to build their capabilities as well as to create new value strategies, (2) how e-banking capabilities have been built, and (3) the role played by e-banking in shaping the strategic direction of banks. This requires understanding of a variety of aspects (i) the value created by e-banking products and services within different banks, (ii) the process of e-banking development within the different banks, (iii) how banks approach e-banking products and services, and (iv) how the banks align the demand and supply factors surrounding e-banking products and servicesThe theoretical approach blends inputs from different disciplines relevant to understand and deal with the subject matter of this thesis, including value creation and capability-building literature, technology implementation literature, with particular emphasis on the processes of implementing network technologies and e-businesses, as well as literature on process approaches. The methodological approach makes use of the case study strategy (Yin 2003) as research strategy, a multiple-case embedded design, as research design strategy, and three sources of evidence: (1) a survey distributed to all Saudi Arabian banks, (2) semi-structured interviews, and (3) archival records of e-banking transactions. The main fieldwork is longitudinal and takes place during three rounds: SeptemberOctober 2003, December 2003-March 2004, and December 2005-January 2006.The thesis investigates the emergence and evolution of e-banking at six Saudi Arabian banks: Samba Financial Group (Samba), AlRajhi Bank (AlRajhi), Saudi Investment Bank (Saib), Saudi Hollandi Bank (Hollandi), National Commercial Bank (AlAhli), and Riyad Bank (Riyad). This is followed by an investigation of the emergence and evolution of electronic securities trading systems at the Saudi Capital Market (i. e., Tadawul), providing an external view of the emergence and evolution of ebanking in Saudi Arabia.The analysis of the empirical material implements the theoretical propositions strategy via utilisation of the "sociotechnical constituencies" approach (Molina 1990; 1993) and its associated analytical tools of the "diamond of alignment" (Molina 1995), "alignment web" (Molina 2003) and "dynamic strategy mapping" (DSM) (Molina 2005). The aim is not only to use the approach to reveal how banks build their e-banking capabilities and create new value strategies, but also to test critically the applicability of the "sociotechnical constituencies" approach and its associated analytical tools for understanding e-banking value creation and capability-building strategies.The overall result of the investigation conducted by this thesis suggests that the Saudi Arabian ebanking' constituency-building process shows distinctive processes of sociotechnical alignment by each one of the specific Saudi banks' e-banking constituencies in the study. In addition, the use of Molina's "alignment web" to assess the state of each of the specific e-banking constituency-building processes helps identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses in these processes of sociotechnical alignment. The distinctiveness of development by each sociotechnical constituency is also highlighted by the application of the Molina's "dynamic strategy mapping" (DSM), showing that each constituency has its own combination of strategic ingredients.Although this thesis demonstrates strengths in the areas of logic replication, narrative writing, and validating procedure, in future studies it would be interesting to enhance its theoretical background, chronological structure, and quantitative assessment. This thesis contributes to providing a rich insight into the emergence and evolution of e-banking in Saudi Arabia, particularly at six of eleven Saudi banks as well as the technological systems of the Saudi Capital Market. Such contribution may be used to inform the future alignment strategy pursued by each the Saudi Arabian e-banking constituencies