'Insights' continuous publication case study

'Insights: the UKSG Journal' switched to a continuous publication model in early 2018, following a decision by the Editorial Board in November 2017. The prospect of a switch had been discussed a number of times previously. In the event, the decision was quickly made and the transition largely smooth. Given UKSG’s position as a membership organization including many publishing members, it was considered that a case study of the process would be useful in helping members and other publishers to consider and execute a similar transition

Epistemic trust in online higher education : a mixed method phenomenological research study

The purpose of this study was to explore the online instructor’s role in building epistemic trusting relationships with adult learners in their online classrooms. A mixed-method phenomenology research (MMPR) approach was used to discover if certain instructor actions influenced an epistemic trust relationship to develop between the instructor and the adult learner. This study examined the instructor’s classroom management actions, communication immediacy actions, and regulatory actions, as well as the level of epistemic trust in 48 fully online courses, focusing on 4 exemplar cases for cross-case analysis. It was determined that the instructor’s classroom management actions and communication immediacy actions explained 52% of the variation in epistemic trust. The instructor’s regularity actions played a lesser role by initializing early trust (a shallower trust than epistemic trust), a necessary foundation on which to build epistemic trust relationships. The regulatory actions also provided support for the other two types of instructor actions by creating a sense of the instructor’s fairness and availability. The study advanced a causation network that made visible a path from early trust of the instructor to an epistemic trust relationship with the instructor. These results suggest that instructors that practice these three types of actions in the online classroom have the potential to influence epistemic trust relationships with the adult learners, thereby improving learner motivation, cooperation, critical thinking, satisfaction, and academic performance. The findings presented in this study provide a possible epistemic trust model that may contribute to future research for developing a theory of epistemic trust

Making research evaluation processes in Europe more transparent

Researchers repeatedly cite career advancement as a key incentive for their practices and behaviours. This is critical to understanding the pace of change in scholarly communications, as those researchers inclined to innovate or experiment with new forms of research outputs, methodologies, or communication styles risk being penalised by the evaluation system used by many research institutions that are slow to adapt to the modern research environment. Sarah Slowe, Gareth Cole, Jon Tennant and Charlie Rapple are gathering data on current promotion and hiring guidelines used throughout Europe and will analyse how these compare to researchers’ attitudes of “publish or perish” and the impact factor as the key determining factor for career advancement. A number of recommendations will follow from this analysis, with the ultimate aim of fostering a more informed evaluation, promotion, and recruitment system for researchers

Shakespeare, the Irish, and Military Culture

Ireland was peripheral to Shakespeare’s thinking. The notion of the sister kingdom and the existence of its inhabitants were familiar to him, but this familiarity did not lead to curiosity. Ireland and the Irish could be portrayed as bogeymen: current anxieties in London about revolting Gaelic-Irish troops in the Netherlands, the reverses the Crown army suffered in the Nine Years’ War and the corruption that Irish service visited both upon the English body politic and its servitors were all grist to the playwright’s mill. Despite Shakespeare’s diffidence on Irish matters the figures of Henry V, Falstaff and, of course, the English-Irish captain MacMorris provide real insights into the reality of how Ireland and Irish affairs were perceived by a metropolitan English audience in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.</p