Quality Culture: understandings,boundaries and linkages

As part of the process of enhancing quality, quality culture has become a taken-for-granted concept intended to support development and improvement processes in higher education. By taking a theoretical approach to examining quality culture, starting with a scholarly examination of the concept of culture, and exploring how it is related to quality, quality improvement and quality assurance, the aim of this paper is to create a better understanding of how one can make sense of quality culture, its boundaries but also its links to the fundamental processes of teaching and learning.     

心灵的声音

最最亲爱的朋友, 你的倾听不仅仅是用耳朵, 向是用心灵, 用悟性, 用灵魂, 还有全部的生命。     

Pricing principles used by scholarly open access publishers

The article processing charge (APC) is currently the primary method of funding professionally published open access (OA) peer‐reviewed journals. The pricing principles of 77 OA publishers publishing over 1,000 journals using APCs were studied and classified. The most commonly used pricing method is a single fixed fee, which can either be the same for all of a publisher's journals or individually determined for each journal. Fees are usually only levied for publication of accepted papers, but there are some journals that also charge submission fees. Instead of fixed prices, many publishers charge by the page or have multi‐tiered fees depending on the length of articles. The country of origin of the author can also influence the pricing, in order to facilitate publishing for authors from developing countries.     

The Impact of the European Standards and Guidelines in Agency Evaluations

The emergence of the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) for Quality Assurance has been seen as an important step towards realising the European Higher Education Area by creating more transparency and accountability in the area of quality assurance. The ESG also include standards as to how quality assurance agencies should be reviewed. In a meta-analysis of the reviews undertaken of quality assurance agencies, this article explores to what extent the ESG is having an impact on the reviews.