The impact of consortia purchasing of periodical publications on the document supply service

Purpose – This paper aims to show the impact of consortia purchased periodical publications on document supply services. These services have undergone considerable changes over the last five years, first decreasing but now recovering. Design/methodology/approach – First, this paper reviews the most recent specialised literature, focusing mainly on the impact of electronic journals in libraries, their effects, and proposed actions. Second, as an example of this new behaviour, presents the document supply service data, as collected in one hospital’s health-science library in the last four years. Findings – As evidenced by the literature, the users’ acceptance of electronic journals has undoubtedly been excellent. Consortia purchasing projects have become a basic tool that expand collections, support cooperative technological development, and require negotiating skills from librarians. But these mass purchases do not seem to be the ideal solution for libraries, they entail losing freedom when choosing the collection and often make library collections homogeneous by publisher. Originality/value – Reflects on what possible causes have led to the current situation and the current way to manage the collection.Publicad

Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, we show how certain classes of deals are both sufficient and necessary to guarantee that a socially optimal allocation of resources will be reached eventually

Why Water Markets Are Not Quick Fixes for Droughts in the Western United States

Water in the western United States can be bought and sold, but the transactions will always be complicated. Transfers of water will always be expensive and time consuming because of the hydrologic and institutional interconnections inherent to water. Our data show that most of the water rights in the West are messy. Therefore, markets cannot be quick fixes, and using markets for future water allocation, even if it is economically efficient, will take time and resources to set up. Untangling serial uses and negotiating multiple ownership claims are hurdles, not barriers, and they can be overcome in time but will require both time and money. Buying existing water rights may be less costly than building infrastructure to transport available water from long distances or desalinating seawater, but the transactions will come at a price. Municipalities may purchase water from farmers and thus bear the transaction costs directly, or the private sector may purchase agricultural water (e.g., Two Rivers Water and Farming, Colorado (Landry 2012)), bear the associated risk and transaction costs, and sell it on to municipalities. In either case, the end users will inevitably pay higher prices for water. Markets can and will be part of western U.S. water allocation, but they do not provide quick solutions. Droughts can focus public attention on the value of water and potentially increase the willingness-to-pay prices that reflect the transaction costs of tangled western water markets

Price and competition: consortial strategies for procuring information

The issues discussed here (the advantages of consortium purchase; national or regional negotiation; separation of electronic from hard-copy procurement; creating competition between monopoly suppliers) are treated more fully in my report on research undertaken for Resource (The [UK] Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) in March 2002, and in an earlier paper

The economic evolution of petroleum property rights in the United States.

We examine Harold Demsetz's (1967) prediction that property rights emerge and are refined as the benefits of doing so exceed the costs in the context of oil and gas resources in the U.S. Familiar influences on the development of petroleum property rights, technology, market demand, and politics, provide support for the hypothesis, and those issues are examined. Our primary contribution is to demonstrate the important role of a less familiar factor, the presence in the reservoir of both oil and gas with differentially volatile prices. This factor has affected the nature of the property rights assigned with unitization, an institutional arrangement to internalize the common pool externality. Information asymmetries and conflicting price expectations have resulted in unit agreements that would not have been predicted in a strict neo-classical sense. Our analysis provides new insights regarding the nature of voluntary unitization contracts, inherent limits to producers' ability to internalize externalities, and the welfare implications of compulsory unitization.

Water rights and multiple water uses: framework and application to Kirindi Oya irrigation system, Sri Lanka

The growing attention to water rights in recent years reflects the increasing scarcity and competition for this vital resource. Because rights are at the heart of any water allocation system, they are also critical for any reallocation. Not only efficiency, but also fundamental issues of equity are at stake. To understand water rights requires going beyond formal statutory law (which may or may not be followed), to look at the many bases for claiming water. Because of the vital nature of this resource, state law, religious law, customary law and local norms all have something to say in defining water rights. The delineation of water rights is further complicated when we take into consideration multiple uses (irrigation, domestic, fishing, livestock, industries, etc.) as well as multiple users (different villages, groups of farmers in the head and tail, fishermen, cattle owners, etc.) of the resource. These overlapping uses bring in different government agencies, as well as different sets of norms and rules related to water. This paper provides a framework for examining the statutory and customary water rights of multiple users of water and applies it in the Kirindi Oya irrigation system in Sri Lanka, based on a multidisciplinary study conducted in 1997-1998. It demonstrates that the range of stakeholders with an interest in water resources of an irrigation system go far beyond the owners and cultivators of irrigated fields. As such, these groups are not only claimants on the ongoing management of water resource systems, but also need to be included in any considerations of transferring water from irrigation to other uses.Water rights., Water resources., Water use Sri Lanka Case studies., Irrigation projects Sri Lanka.,

Reallocation Problems in Agent Societies: A Local Mechanism to Maximize Social Welfare

Resource reallocation problems are common in real life and therefore gain an increasing interest in Computer Science and Economics. Such problems consider agents living in a society and negotiating their resources with each other in order to improve the welfare of the population. In many studies however, the unrealistic context considered, where agents have a flawless knowledge and unlimited interaction abilities, impedes the application of these techniques in real life problematics. In this paper, we study how agents should behave in order to maximize the welfare of the society. We propose a multi-agent method based on autonomous agents endowed with a local knowledge and local interactions. Our approach features a more realistic environment based on social networks, inside which we provide the behavior for the agents and the negotiation settings required for them to lead the negotiation processes towards socially optimal allocations. We prove that bilateral transactions of restricted cardinality are sufficient in practice to converge towards an optimal solution for different social objectives. An experimental study supports our claims and highlights the impact of a realistic environment on the efficiency of the techniques utilized.Resource Allocation, Negotiation, Social Welfare, Agent Society, Behavior, Emergence

Participation in the global knowledge commons : challenges and opportunities for research dissemination in developing countries

Due to improving Internet connectivity and a growing number of international initiatives, knowledge workers in developing countries are now getting access to scholarly and scientific publications and electronic resources at a level that is unmatched historically. This is highly significant, particularly in areas of medicine, agricultural and environmental sciences, and development literature that are much needed if developing countries are to meet the Millennium Development Goals. At the same time, the Open Access movement and the growing number of Open Archive Initiative (OAI) compliant institutional repositories promise to provide even greater access to resources and scientific publications that were previously inaccessible. These low cost technology and interoperability standards are also providing great opportunities for libraries and publishers in developing countries to disseminate local research and knowledge and to bridge the South-North knowledge gap. This article reviews these recent trends, discusses their significance for information access in developing countries, and provides recommendations for knowledge workers on how to actively participate in and contribute to the global knowledge commons

Subverting the ground : private property and public protest in the sixteenth-century Yorkshire Wolds

As a forum for litigating property disputes, the Star Chamber left records that provide crucial evidence for investigating the way people understood and experienced the landscape around them at precisely the time that the modern concept of property in land was emerging. Using cases from the Yorkshire Wolds, the paper explores the roles litigation, direct action and riots played in both asserting and subverting property interests, with the aim of reclaiming something of the materiality of the events reported in the court. Particular attention is paid to two key practices by which enclosure and common rights could be negotiated 'on the ground': that is, by grazing animals on the common fields or closes and by ploughing up - or subverting - grassland