Scholarly communication in the digital environment: what do authors want?

This article reports on a large‐scale international survey of authors' perception and experience of the journals system conducted by ciber in association with National Opinion Polls (NOP). It explores the factors that inform authors' decisions where to publish and, in particular, which groups of readers they perceive to be most important. It probes readership behaviour and the values that underlie authors' attitudes towards copyright and emerging business models, notably open access. It is concluded that many aspects of author behaviour are highly conservative and that a significant shift towards open access is, in the short to medium term, highly unlikely.     

Digital is the Future—And the Now: EmPosium on Digital Platform Listening Trends

Editor’s Note: A JRAM email symposium is structured in the same way of a convention symposium. A group is empaneled to discuss an issue, a moderator asks the panel to address a series of questions while one or more discussants are tasked with responding to the panelists and acting as a surrogate for the audience in the understanding and the interrogation of the ideas presented. In this symposium, panelists were emailed a list of identical questions by the moderator. Panelists and discussants were selected for their knowledge, experience, and the diversity of ideas they bring to the symposium. The answers were then collated, lightly edited for spelling or syntax, arranged in a readable order, and then emailed to the discussants for their feedback. Follow-up questions were only asked for the purpose of clarity with regard to a definition or a convoluted sentence. Both panelists and discussants were encouraged to respond conversationally to the issues.     

Breaking up is hard to do: the resilience of the rock group as an organizational form for creating music

Though there is a long tradition of band members quitting the group or taking a hiatus, the rock group as an organization to produce music continues to be both popular and economically viable. The research question addressed in this paper is whether or not it is a good idea to quit or take a hiatus from the group. We begin with a discussion of the framework for understanding why groups are formed and why they may be difficult to keep together. We then discuss differences between groups in the decade of the 1960s versus today. We argue that there is something unique about the output of the group even with the changes in the structure of contracts, compensation, and consumer focus on the artist that explain the resilience of the rock band as an organizational form within which to create music. We compare the charting success of bands that have members leave the group with the charting success of the members who left the group. We identified the groups in five representative years: 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005. We then analyzed the entire Billboard Hot 100 charting careers of those groups and the artists who quit those groups. Our main finding is that when charting success is divided equally among members, going solo pays off—there is a clear economic rationale because solo acts have greater average charting success than the original bands they started in. The other ensuing side projects: duos, collaborations, and other groups are not as lucrative as the original bands. These findings are valid for members of charting groups from each of the 5 years examined. Despite the difficulties in keeping a rock band together, there are fewer band breakups today and remaining with the group generally results in a longer and more productive charting career. Thus, the rock group remains an important organization for producing contemporary music. However, there remains a compelling incentive to go solo. Superstars may benefit from solo projects, but for the average, non-superstar group member, in many circumstances it is better for the band to stay together if the income is divided equally.     

The Development of the Olympic Narrative in Chinese Elite Sport Discourse from Its First Successful Olympic Bid to the Post-Beijing Games Era

Abstract

As a phenomenon exogenous to China, the Olympics have been proactively interpreted in the local context since China’s entry (and subsequent re-entry in 1984) into the Olympic movement. With China’s increasing involvement in promoting three bids to host the Olympic Games, two of which were successful, respectively, in 2001 and 2015, the nature of the discourse of key stakeholders in relation to Chinese elite sport has both reflected and reshaped the meaning of the Games to Chinese elite sport. This paper examines the discursive construction process of the Olympics in the Chinese elite sport system by key stakeholders through analyzing statements of political figures on sport and Olympic phenomena, Chinese elite sport policy documents, and the commentaries of leading Chinese sport academics. The analysis of discourse highlights two main features in the construction of the Games in official accounts during the period under investigation. The development of these two themes reflects the nature of the Chinese Olympic discourse, manifests the political power over the interpretation of the Olympics in Chinese context, and continues to characterize the on-going major themes in Chinese elite sport policy.     

The endless spiral

A Danish textbook on the history of technology,Skruen uden ende — Den vestlige teknologis historie (The Endless Spiral: A History of Western Technology), was published in 1990. In the present article, one of the authors presents some of the background to this event and puts the work into historical perspective by describing a number of different traditions for writing textbooks on the history of technology. Next follows a discussion of why history of technology ought to be an important ingredient in upper secondary education and why only the contextualist tradition — inspired by the rapidly developing school of research centered around the journalTechnology & Culture — offers any real hope for providing meaningful teaching materials on history of technology. The paper ends with a brief outline of the textbook's contents, with special emphasis on one of its several case studies describing the development of certain mainstream technologies in the context of the scientific, economic, social and cultural developments existing when the particular technology came into being.     

A New Approach to Avoiding Problems of Scale in Interpreting Trends in Mental Measurement Data

Extracting policy-relevant information from large national surveys of educational achievement is ordinarily a nontrivial task. It is made more treacherous when the data are expressed on scales that are not uniquely determined. The paper begins with a critical analysis of a recent attempt to interpret the findings on reading achievement obtained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It then describes a new approach to the quantification and interpretation of change and demonstrates its appropriateness for repeated cross-sectional designs such as NAEP. Limitations imposed by the survey design and the nature of the measurements are highlighted