A Wel(l)come development: research funders and open access

This paper discusses the implications of the Wellcome Trust agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer in which authors of accepted papers are able to pay an open-access publication charge to make their article freely available online. In bringing together flexible licence terms and clear funding streams, the agreement has the potential to be used as a way of migrating towards possible new business models for journal publishing. It also has the potential, if implemented more widely, to deliver greater open access in such a way as to work in the interests of a broad range of stakeholders.

Can open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals coexist?

It is often assumed that open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals are in competition with each other and therefore will in the long term be unable to coexist. This paper takes a critical look at that assumption. It draws on the available evidence of actual practice which indicates that coexistence is possible at least in the medium term. It discusses possible future models of publication and dissemination which include open access, repositories, peer review and journals. The paper suggests that repositories and journals may coexist in the long term but that both may have to undergo significant changes. Important areas where changes need to occur include: widespread deployment of repository infrastructure, development of version identification standards, development of value-added features, new business models, new approaches to quality control and adoption of digital preservation as a repository function.

Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe

This article addresses some implications for gender equality and gender policy at European and national levels of transformations in family, economy and polity, which challenge gender regimes across Europe. Women’s labour market participation in the west and the collapse of communism in the east have undermined the systems and assumptions of western male breadwinner and dual worker models of central and eastern Europe. Political reworking of the work/welfare relationship into active welfare has individualised responsibility. Individualisation is a key trend west − and in some respects east − and challenges the structures that supported care in state and family. The links that joined men to women, cash to care, incomes to carers have all been fractured. The article will argue that care work and unpaid care workers are both casualties of these developments. Social, political and economic changes have not been matched by the development of new gender models at the national level. And while EU gender policy has been admired as the most innovative aspect of its social policy, gender equality is far from achieved: women’s incomes across Europe are well below men’s; policies for supporting unpaid care work have developed modestly compared with labour market activation policies.Enlargement brings new challenges as it draws together gender regimes with contrasting histories and trajectories. The article will map social policies for gender equality across the key elements of gender regimes – paid work, care work, income, time and voice – and discuss the nature of a model of gender equality that would bring gender equality across these. It analyses ideas about a dual earner–dual carer model, in the Dutch combination scenario and ‘universal caregiver’ models, at household and civil society levels. These offer a starting point for a model in which paid and unpaid work are equally valued and equally shared between men and women, but we argue that a citizenship model, in which paid and unpaid work obligations are underpinned by social rights, is more likely to achieve gender equality.

DNA charge neutralisation by linear polymers II: reversible binding

We model the way in which polymers bind to DNA and neutralise its charged backbone by analysing the dynamics of the distribution of gaps along the DNA. We generalise existing theory for irreversible binding to construct new deterministic models which include polymer removal, movement along the DNA and allow for binding with overlaps. We show that reversible binding alters the capacity of the DNA for polymers by allowing the rearrangement of polymer positions over a longer timescale than when binding is irreversible. When the polymers do not overlap, allowing reversible binding increases the number of polymers adhered and hence the charge that the DNA can accommodate; in contrast, when overlaps occur, reversible binding reduces the amount of charge neutralised by the polymers.

A new method for conditioning stochastic groundwater flow models in fractured media

Many geological formations consist of crystalline rocks that have very low matrix permeability but allow flow through an interconnected network of fractures. Understanding the flow of groundwater through such rocks is important in considering disposal of radioactive waste in underground repositories. A specific area of interest is the conditioning of fracture transmissivities on measured values of pressure in these formations. This is the process where the values of fracture transmissivities in a model are adjusted to obtain a good fit of the calculated pressures to measured pressure values. While there are existing methods to condition transmissivity fields on transmissivity, pressure and flow measurements for a continuous porous medium there is little literature on conditioning fracture networks. Conditioning fracture transmissivities on pressure or flow values is a complex problem because the measurements are not linearly related to the fracture transmissivities and they are also dependent on all the fracture transmissivities in the network. We present a new method for conditioning fracture transmissivities on measured pressure values based on the calculation of certain basis vectors; each basis vector represents the change to the log transmissivity of the fractures in the network that results in a unit increase in the pressure at one measurement point whilst keeping the pressure at the remaining measurement points constant. The fracture transmissivities are updated by adding a linear combination of basis vectors and coefficients, where the coefficients are obtained by minimizing an error function. A mathematical summary of the method is given. This algorithm is implemented in the existing finite element code ConnectFlow developed and marketed by Serco Technical Services, which models groundwater flow in a fracture network. Results of the conditioning are shown for a number of simple test problems as well as for a realistic large scale test case.