Social media campaigns,electoral momentum,and vote shares: evidence from the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council election

By studying candidates’ Facebook fan pages and rolling poll data during the Hong Kong Legislative Council election in 2016, this article aims at examining the relationships between candidates’ campaign performance on social media, electoral momentum, and vote shares. We contend that, under specific contextual conditions, social media campaigns could affect candidates’ momentum during the election period, which can in turn affect vote shares. We also examine how the relationships between social media performance and electoral momentum vary according to the candidates’ background characteristics, including age, political affiliation, incumbency status, and scale of the campaign of the political group to which the candidates belong. The results show that candidates’ social media performance can indeed predict vote shares indirectly via the mediation of electoral momentum. The predictive power of social media performance is stronger for pro-democracy candidates, incumbents, and candidates belonging to political groups with larger election campaigns.     

The changing copyright landscape in academic publishing

Key points

• This article marks the publication of the Tenth edition Clark's Publishing Agreements: A book of precedents.
• The growing complexity of traditional assignment agreements is accompanied by researchers’ misunderstanding about their rights.
• There is a shifting balance between assignment and licensing of rights in an author's work.
• Academics continue to agree standard assignment contracts even where they disagree with the principles.
• Publishers are loosening control over copyright in response to demands from funders and a growing minority of researchers.
• There is a complex range of researchers’ attitudes to copyright issues.

     

The future of academic publishing: Revolution or evolution?

Key points

• Concerns about a crisis in monograph publishing date back to at least the 1990s, and for traditional journal publishing at least a decade.
• Two key trends behind concerns over book and journal models are pressures on funding and the emergence of open access.
• Despite predictions of a revolution, the academic publishing sector has proved remarkably resilient in adapting to market changes.
• Whilst showing some support for ‘open science’, even early career researchers remain committed to traditional publishing models.
• The growth in scholarly collaboration networks and in sharing across traditional boundaries is the more likely disrupter of traditional publishing.

     

Science and report writing

In recent years Australian primary schools have adopted an across-the-curriculum approach to writing. However, relatively little research has been conducted in the area of primary science. This paper reports the result of a small scale collaborative study involving a Year 2 and a Year 5 class, and their classroom teacher, which used science activities as the basis for developing report-writing skills using a framework consisting of three focus questions. Students in both classes learned to use the framework in one term and it was found that it improved the quality of reports. Specialisations: science and technology curriculum development, secondary and primary teacher education in agriculture, science and environmental education. Specialisations: cognition and curriculum, early childhood and primary teacher education in science and social education.