Value for Money in Electronic Journals
Abstract The author examines the proposition that electronic journals provide enhanced value for their costs when compared to print subscriptions. At the journal, article, and use levels, the author reviews the pricing policies of two different journal publishers, one commercial and one nonprofit. He confirms and extends these findings using recently published research. Whereas much research remains to be undertaken on the basis of standards, and definitions must be agreed on, the existing, albeit imperfect, evidence indicates that both libraries and their readers benefit significantly from electronic journals in the areas of cost per use and convenience of delivery of scholarly and research literature. This proposition serves as a clarion call for more detailed research based on agreed-upon on standards. Serials Review 2003; 29:83–88.
A fuzzy bicriteria approach for journal deselection in a hospital library
AbstractCollection management is an important duty of librarians. In the last years journal prices have increased and library decision-makers have been forced to consider cancelling some journal subscriptions as budgets have not increased always by the same ratio. This fact has made it essential to supply reliable and efficient measures about the importance of different journals for in-house users in order to help the decision-makers to cancel subscriptions.Many journal-use studies can be found in the literature providing methods for making these kinds of decisions, but usually they consider only one single and precise decision criterion. Nevertheless, it is common knowledge that any real decision usually considers more than one criterion, and so the problem of choosing a set of journals to cancel is compounded by the existence of conflicting criteria, such as the cost of the journal and demand for the journal.As predicting possible number of users of a certain journal is a complex task, the expert's judg...
Exploring the Textual Alchemy of Legal Gender: Experimental Statutes and the Message in the Medium
This article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its ‘alchemy’, in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular “they”, the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures.