Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances

© 2012 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.This article considers the determinants and effects of M&As in the pharmaceutical industry, with a particular focus on innovation and R&D productivity. As is the case in other industries, mergers in the pharmaceutical field are driven by a variety of company motives and conditions. These include defensive responses to industry shocks as well as more proactive rationales, such as economies of scale and scope, access to new technologies, and expansion to new markets. It is important to take account of firms' characteristics and motivations in evaluating merger performance, rather than using a broad aggregate brushstroke. Research to date on pharmaceuticals suggests considerable variation in both motivation and outcomes. From an antitrust policy standpoint, the larger horizontal mergers in pharmaceuticals have run into few challenges from regulatory authorities in the United States and the European Union, given the option to spin off competing therapeutic products to other drug firms.

Reason, risk, and reward: Models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission-based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.

Usage analysis of tier 2 public computers: Perkins & Bostock libraries first floor - May 2016

A spring 2016 report about public computer usage on the first floor of Perkins and Bostock libraries. This report includes data from survey questions, an observational study, and transaction logs. The report also includes recommendations for changes based on the data collected.