Lifecycle information for e-literature: a summary from the LIFE project.

The LIFE Project has developed a methodology to calculate the long-term costs and future requirements of the preservation of digital assets. LIFE has achieved this by analysing and comparing three different digital collections and by applying a lifecycle approach to each. From this work LIFE has identified a number of strategic issues and common needs. The critical strategic issues are: •There is a need for a wider collaborative approach between Higher Education (HE) and Libraries to aid in the cost-effective development of tools and methods. •The time required for the realistic development of the next generation of these tools and methodologies is largely unknown and should form part of a collective responsibility within the digital preservation community. •There exists a real opportunity to establish long-term partnerships between institutions to address common requirements. The challenge is to establish multidisciplinary Project teams and programmes to lead these developments. •There exists a real opportunity to establish long-term partnerships between institutions and industry to develop this methodology and to establish new opportunities to share knowledge and experience. The LIFE project could become an important vehicle for the development of these new opportunities

Digital library economics : aspects and prospects

A review of the issues surrounding the economics of and economic justification for, digital libraries

Recent developments in scholarly communication: a review

This review article on recent developments in scholarly communication focuses on the content of three 2013 publications: The future of scholarly communication, edited by Deborah Shorley; Debating open access, edited by Nigel Vincent and Chris Wickham; The big deal and the damage done, by Walt Crawford

How much does teenage parenthood affect long term outcomes? A systematic review.

Background: The rates of teenage pregnancy in the UK are relatively high. Although early entry to parenthood can be a positive experience, most studies find large adverse effects on long term outcomes for the mother, child and father, in addition to being costly for the NHS. This is why the government launched its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999. However, there is growing evidence that teenage pregnancy might be mainly an indicator of disadvantage which is the underlying cause of the negative outcomes. Methods: A systematic literature review was undertaken of studies which used a UK dataset to quantify any long term outcomes of a teenage birth upon the mother, father or child. Studies were included if they used appropriate methods to isolate the causal effect of early parenthood. The databases searched included Medline, Cochrane, EconLit and Web of Science. Results: Six studies were identified by the review; five studies considered the mother’s socioeconomic outcomes, one study reported the child’s outcomes, and no studies met the inclusion criteria for the father’s outcomes. The studies suggested that early motherhood accounts for relatively few of the negative long term socioeconomic outcomes and it is predominantly an indicator of a disadvantaged family background. Conclusion: Limited evidence is available to understand the long term outcomes associated with teenage birth within the UK for the mother, father and child. Current econometric studies suggest that effective interventions to prevent teenage pregnancies will not eradicate the poorer long term socioeconomic outcomes often associated with early motherhood. Thus policy should focus on reducing initial disadvantage in addition to preventing teenage pregnancy. Additional econometric analyses around the mothers’, fathers’ and children’s long term socioeconomic and health-related outcomes would be valuable

Lifecycle information for e-literature: full report from the LIFE project

This Report is a record of the LIFE Project. The Project has been run for one year and its aim is to deliver crucial information about the cost and management of digital material. This information should then in turn be able to be applied to any institution that has an interest in preserving and providing access to electronic collections. The Project is a joint venture between The British Library and UCL Library Services. The Project is funded by JISC under programme area (i) as listed in paragraph 16 of the JISC 4/04 circular- Institutional Management Support and Collaboration and as such has set requirements and outcomes which must be met and the Project has done its best to do so. Where the Project has been unable to answer specific questions, strong recommendations have been made for future Project work to do so. The outcomes of this Project are expected to be a practical set of guidelines and a framework within which costs can be applied to digital collections in order to answer the following questions: • What is the long term cost of preserving digital material; • Who is going to do it; • What are the long term costs for a library in HE/FE to partner with another institution to carry out long term archiving; • What are the comparative long-term costs of a paper and digital copy of the same publication; • At what point will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper for publications available in parallel formats; • What are the relative risks of digital versus paper archiving. The Project has attempted to answer these questions by using a developing lifecycle methodology and three diverse collections of digital content. The LIFE Project team chose UCL e-journals, BL Web Archiving and the BL VDEP digital collections to provide a strong challenge to the methodology as well as to help reach the key Project aim of attributing long term cost to digital collections. The results from the Case Studies and the Project findings are both surprising and illuminating

Open access in Australia: an odyssey of sorts?

Scholarly communication change and open access (OA) initiatives in Australia have followed an Odyssean path in the last decade. The stop-start nature of early initiatives demonstrates that institutional leadership is essential for the successful deposit of academic content in an institutional repository. Similarly, OA policies from the two Australian Research Councils were delayed for nearly a decade, partly due to publisher pressure and bureaucratic conservatism. More successful has been the development of full, or hybrid, open access university e-presses. These presses, usually embedded in the scholarly infrastructure of the university, provide monographic models for wider global consideration. Australian universities are now reflecting, partly through recent Research Council edicts and monitoring global OA developments, greater awareness of the need for action in scholarly communication change Journal: Insights 26.3 (2013): 282-28

Directions in research of the oldest Polish press (1501–1729)

This article contains a brief overview of the research on Polish press from the years 1501–1729, and discusses its directions and results conducted by historians and press experts after 1945. A citation analysis is widely used in the evaluation of the research output. The interest in the oldest Polish press is relatively high. A total of 55 scholars worked in the field, publishing 102 works (including 16 books), cited 524 times (including 267 times below the half-life period). Eight authors had the largest contribution: Konrad Zawadzki, Kazimierz Maliszewski, Jan Lankau, Władysław Myk, Adam Przyboś, Jan Pirożyński, Janusz A. Drob and Urszula Augustyniak. The most frequent subjects of research were ephemeral and serial newspapers, Merkuriusz Polski and handwritten newspapers, as well as other periodic newspapers and press from Gdańs

Equality in Health: An Annotated Bibliography With Resources on Health Disparities and Cultural and Linguistic Competency

Provides citations for articles, reports, books, and online resources on racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care, strategies to reduce them, assessment tools for cultural and linguistic competency, training and education, and other issues

Economic evaluation of LIFE methodology

Background: The LIFE project (Lifecycle Information For E-Literature) was carried out during 2004-2006 by a consortium consisting of The British Library and University College London Library Services . The project was joint venture funded by JISC under the programme area Institutional Management Support and Collaboration. The project has received favourable feedback, for instance during a workshop organised at the end of it, and JISC has agreed to fund a second phase during 2007-2008. The consortium has been strengthened by three associate partners (SHERPA-LEAP Consortium, SHERPA-DP and the Medical Research Council). In addition some funds were reserved for the use of an outside economic consultant for an evaluation of the life-cycle models that emerged as the key results from the first phase. The LIFE-2 project consists of five work packages, and this report is part of the first of these. The objective of WP 1 is formulated in the LIFE 2 Project proposal as follows: Validation of the economic modelling and methodology for the Lifecycle and Generic Preservation formulae developed in Phase 1 of the LIFE project, with technical and presentational development of the models. Cloudlake Consulting Oy has been commissioned by the consortium to carry out this validation. The report has been written by Bo-Christer Björk. He is professor of Information Systems Science at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki, Finland. He has been conducting research concerning the scientific publishing process since 2000 and has published several peer reviewed journal articles as well as conference papers on the subject. He is often an invited speaker at international workshops in this area