Publisher and author partnerships: a changing landscape

This article discusses the changing relationships of authors and publishers, the current trends and challenges they face, and the direction of these relationships in the future. As the STM publishing industry finds itself in the midst of significant technological and economic changes, this article provides background to these changes and looks at the key elements, including open access business development, institutional repository trends, and emerging public financing policies in the future.     

Maintaining Discipline in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during the National Socialist Regime

In responding to incidents of internal ‘indiscipline’, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society many times asserted its authority, sometimes in cooperation with agencies of the Nazi regime. Following the Second World War, however, the KWS represented itself as having been intrinsically anti-Nazi. This essay describes the assumptions inherent in this view, and points to its wider implications for post-war German science.     

What Assessment and Research Say About the Condition of Education

Do students today know less than their parents or grandparents did as students? Are they being academically outclassed by students of other nations? Or have ideologically driven policy makers painted an unnecessarily negative picture of student achievement?     

Sport as a Valued Human Practice: a basis for the consideration of some moral issues in sport

ABSTRACT It is argued that sport, like science or medicine, is a valued human practice and is characterised as much by the moral manner in which its participants conduct themselves as by the pursuit of its own skills, standards and excellences. Virtues, such as justice, honesty and courage, are not only necessary to pursue its goals but to protect it from being corrupted by external interests. After explicating the practice view of sport in contrast to the sociological view, the nature of competition in sport is discussed before examining two related issues: winning at all costs and the taking of performance-enhancing drugs. The importance of practices to education and the good life is also outlined.     

Virtual and non‐virtual realities: the changing roles of libraries and librarians

What is the future for libraries and their librarians? In trying to give an answer to this pressing question we do not deal with utopian libraries of the next century, but with the library and the librarian of the next decade. The emphasis is on libraries within educational and research institutions, especially university libraries. We examine the changes confronting the library of the future and identify four key aspects of the library of the future. It will be (i) a gateway to information, whatever format this information comes in and wherever it is located; (ii) an expertise centre; (iii) a physical entity, not only in the sense of being a social meeting place and place of scholarly interaction, but also as a place where students and other users are provided with modern study facilities and adequate user support; and (iv) a collection centre of printed material. Such libraries can only take on an appropriate shape and will only survive if the institutions that librarians serve in meet the four criteria outlined above. We look at the demands that will be made on professional library knowledge and skills and the new job responsibilities and job attitudes required.