Access management: the overlooked but critical enabler

• Access management (AM) is a critical, but often overlooked, enabler for publishers looking to expand the appeal of their online resources.
• This article examines why publishers underinvest in AM, and provides practical examples of how this impacts productivity and growth across the organization.
• Three AM trends that offer new growth opportunities are also explored: (i) enabling a wider range of customer types and business models, (ii) supporting a more diverse range of access scenarios, and (iii) facilitating greater personalization through identity management.
• Publishers need to review their AM strategy in light of these opportunities. In particular, publishers that currently support AM in‐house should outsource to specialist vendors if they are not fully committed to investing the expertise and time needed to support this increasing sophistication.

     

Evolution of the Transfer Code of Practice

The Transfer Code of Practice was launched in 2008 as a set of best‐practice guidelines to be followed when a journal changes publisher, with the aim of ensuring uninterrupted access to content for subscribers. The Code has now been updated to reflect the continued evolution of the academic publishing process driven by new technologies, policies, and publishing practices.     

Validation of two accelerometers to determine mechanical loading of physical activities in children

The purpose of this study was to assess the validity of accelerometers using force plates (i.e., ground reaction force (GRF)) during the performance of different tasks of daily physical activity in children. Thirteen children (10.1 (range 5.4–15.7) years, 3 girls) wore two accelerometers (ActiGraph GT3X+ (ACT), GENEA (GEN)) at the hip that provide raw acceleration signals at 100 Hz. Participants completed different tasks (walking, jogging, running, landings from boxes of different height, rope skipping, dancing) on a force plate. GRF was collected for one step per trial (10 trials) for ambulatory movements and for all landings (10 trials), rope skips and dance procedures. Accelerometer outputs as peak loading (g) per activity were averaged. ANOVA, correlation analyses and Bland–Altman plots were computed to determine validity of accelerometers using GRF. There was a main effect of task with increasing acceleration values in tasks with increasing locomotion speed and landing height (P < 0.001). Data from ACT and GEN correlated with GRF (r = 0.90 and 0.89, respectively) and between each other (r = 0.98), but both accelerometers consistently overestimated GRF. The new generation of accelerometer models that allow raw signal detection are reasonably accurate to measure impact loading of bone in children, although they systematically overestimate GRF.     

Knowledge of bout duration influences pacing strategies during small-sided games

This investigation examines pacing during intermittent team sports. Sixteen junior Rugby League players participated in eight different small-sided offside touch games. All games were 24 min, but bout durations differed in continuous (1 × 24 min) or repeated (2 × 12, 3 × 8, 4 × 6, 6 × 4, 8 × 3, 12 × 2 or 24 × 1 min) formats. Repeat bouts were interspersed by 2 min of passive rest, and participants were informed of the bout duration immediately prior to the game. Heart rates, ratings of perceived exertion and data gathered from global positioning system devices were used to investigate the pacing strategies employed within each game. No significant (P > 0.05) between-game differences were observed in total distance; however, during the 1-min bouts, high-speed movement was significantly (P < 0.05) increased, during the first and second quarters of the 24 × 1-min game compared to all other formats (effect size range: 0.75 ± 0.61–1.38 ± 0.47). Furthermore, the rate of decline in high-speed movement over-time was greatest during the 24 × 1-min game with large differences observed between the first and third quarters (effect size: 0.90 ± 0.58). Greater moderate-speed (effect size range: 0.62 ± 0.63–1.56 ± 0.40) and less low-speed (effect size range: 0.69 ± 0.62–1.54 ± 0.40) distances were also observed during the 1-min bouts, yet heart rates were higher during the continuous 1 × 24-min game. Pacing strategies during intermittent activities are influenced by the number and duration of exercise bouts. Practitioners should consider within-game bout durations when prescribing game-based activities to improve aerobic capacity.     

Between education and psychology: school staff perspectives

When discussing contributions from psychology in/to educational practices like school-based mental health promotion, it is peculiar that psychologists (of an educational or clinical kind) or education-oriented sociologists, both not often based in schools or classrooms, dominate the topic. It has been acknowledged that school staff have been over looked and underutilised in contributing to the discussion, particularly as this pertains to sharing perspectives on how they experience their role in relationship to education policy and practice. The study presented here looked to address this situation by seeking the perspectives of school staff on a range of concerns situated at the nexus between education and psychology. Contrary to the type of displaced assessment intimated above, this group of school staff generally accepts they perform a crucial task in supporting students, their main concern being to incisively question how they might negotiate existing role-related pressures to better current school-based practice.     

Longitudinal analysis of the environmental attitudes of university students

This article addresses the important questions that higher education institutions ask concerning their impact on their students’ sustainability-related attributes ‘How do our students’ worldviews change as they experience higher education with us?’ The process of monitoring such a dynamic entity is fraught with statistical complexity but may not be impossible for an institution willing to ask whether or not its educational efforts in ‘education for sustainability’, ‘education for sustainable development’ or ‘environmental education’, and campus sustainability developments, are paralleled by changes in the attitudes of its students. We describe here a longitudinal survey process based on the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale, with two cohorts of students, in three programmes of study, operating over four years, with multiple survey inputs by each student. We implemented the longitudinal analysis using a linear mixed-effects model and describe here the development and testing of this model. We conclude that higher education institutions can benchmark the sustainability attributes of their students and monitor changes, if they are minded to. We invite higher education practitioners worldwide to join us in further developing suitable research instruments, processes and statistical models, and in further analysing the assumptions that link higher education to sustainability and to global citizenship.