Scholarly publishing serves the formal communication needs of scholars or researchers and derives from, and is constructed to reflect, their aspirations and behaviour. Specifically, journal publishing was invented by Oldenburg in 1665 to solve some of the competitive jealousies that existed between the experimentalist founding fathers of the Royal Society. The solutions he came up with have endured to the present day and have even survived the transition to electronic delivery. This article surveys the reasons why this should be so and examines the modern world of electronic journal publishing with particular reference to the players in the publishing cycle, the digital transition, economics and the advent of open access.

Present changes in scientific publishing, especially those summarised by the term ‘Open Access’ (OA), may ultimately lead to the complete replacement of a reader-paid to an author, or funding-paid, publication system. This transformation would shift the financial burden for scientific publishing from the Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), particularly from scientific libraries, universities, etc, to the Research Funding Organisations (RFOs). The transition phase is difficult; it leads to double funding of OA publications (by subscriptions and author-sponsored OA) and may thus increase the overall costs of scientific publishing. This may explain why – with a few exceptions – RFOs have not been at the forefront of the OA paradigm in the past. In 2008, the General Assembly of EUROHORCs, the European organisation of the heads of research councils, agreed to recommend to its member organisations at least a minimal standard of Open Access based on the Berlin Declaration of 2003 (green way of OA). In the long run, the publishing system needs some fundamental changes to reduce the present costs and to keep up its potential. In order to design a new system, all players have to cooperate and be ready to throw overboard some old traditions, lovable as they may be.

Unprecedented technological advancements have radically changed the way we communicate and, at the same time, are effectively transforming science into e-science. In turn, this transformation calls for an evolution in scholarly communication. This review describes several innovations, spanning the last decades of scholarly communication in High Energy Physics: the first repositories, their interaction with peer-reviewed journals, a proposed model for Open Access publishing and a next-generation repository for the field. We hope that some of these innovations, which are deeply rooted in the highly-interconnected and worldwide flavour of the High-Energy Physics community, can serve as an inspiration to other communities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal, supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe.

This paper discusses the change of the leading paradigms in the field of contemporary history in the Federal Republic of Germany. While, during the early post-Second World War period, the study of the interwar period was dominated by the theory of totalitarian dictatorship and the discussion of the deficiencies of the Paris peace treaty system, thereby focusing on the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler, the post-war generation of German historians analysed the emerging political system of the Third Reich from a more systematic perspective, depicting behind the Hitlerian façade the antagonistic political structure that resulted in an accelerating cumulative radicalisation of the Nazi regime. This functionalist approach, however, has recently been attacked for indirectly exculpating the Nazi crimes by underlining the systemic factors leading to the accumulation of terror and violence and is about to be replaced by a rather moralist interpretation of Nazi politics, accentuating the function of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ and the impact of Hitler’s charismatic leadership.

The US media are undergoing a massive transformation, approaching a crisis in journalism, which may portend similar issues in Europe and the rest of the world. Historically, most professional journalism has been done by the print media, especially newspapers. Today, American newspapers are in a state of collapse with circulation dropping at a rapid rate and profitability going to nil or negative. This business is leading to an information crisis that is already having effects on the society and will likely become even more profound, polarizing and perhaps misinforming an entire nation. Print journalists have been the primary suppliers to the electronic media, including television and the internet. This article supplements a speech given at the American Academy in Berlin in May, 2008. It summarizes US media metrics and raises issues of concern about the sustainability of serious journalism in America. While the internet has been the cause of this dilemma, the author sees no economic model that will allow the web in the short term to support major, serious reporting at a large scale. Is the rest of the world about to experience a similar crisis or are media models different enough to avoid such a dramatic fall? This article reflects Baker’s view as a longtime media executive and an academic.

This article examines differences of non-standard employment among parenting couples on the basis of qualitative research carried out in Rome and Naples. Although there is a growing interest in Europe in issues of flexibility and job security, there has been little focus upon the social differences among non-standard workers. Social class differences are assumed to be represented by the polarization between protected and secure employees on the one hand and casual and unprotected ones on the other, as if the latter represented a homogeneous group of marginalized workers. The research presented here offers evidence about three types of social differences among Italian couples of non-standard workers: job insecurity, the impact of various types of work-flexibility, and the organization of home–work boundaries. These vary widely depending upon the content, technological organization and prestige of professional positions that non-standard workers hold. This paper shows how social and economic differences within the group of non-standard workers affect family life.

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.

Exile, for all of its pain and suffering, has offered European writers a way to step out of their national linguistic and cultural environment. Did exiled writers make use of this opportunity, and start writing a ‘literature for Europe’? By no means all did; many of them sealed themselves off in order to maintain the purity of their mother tongue, while others ‘opened up’ and adjusted to the culture of their host country, often even by adopting its language for their writing. Considering these questions, Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres1 is of great help, although her models are Joyce, Beckett, and other writers, who were not exiles in a literal sense. Many ‘genuine’ exiles retained the national mentality of their youth.

My study draws on the construction of a pro-European identity in modern Romania, a process set in motion by two main engines: a political one (the export around 1848 of the Great French Revolution, in a ‘tamed’ version, to Eastern Europe) and a cultural one (the emergence of Paris as the capital-city of European modernism). Born at the periphery of the continent, the Romanian identity project puts on display a series of insightful dimensions: a logic of homogenization, a centripetal pull towards centralization, linguistic standardization and unity, against any centrifugal forces of cultural difference, a top-down dynamics and, finally, an imaginary self-colonizing drive. As illustrated by the Romanian case, the paradigm of European nationalism opened up new ways of linking nation-building to the needs of modern societies and the interests of professional elites.

This article asks what is wrong with national literature departments. Traditional literature departments, even with various politically conscious additions – women writers, authors of colour, postcolonial conditions, linguistic minorities, queer theory – assume by their very structure a romantic notion of the nation state, of borders and of linguistics as a major aspect of national identity and canonicity. The article considers the early German Romantics to see how they understood the twinning of nation and culture, and how this is baggage that Western universities still carry, even as they try to open themselves to other cultures. ‘Frühromantiker’ such as Friedrich Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, Novalis and Fichte (along with Chateaubriand) idealize the Middle Ages as a time of great unity in Europe, and understand nationhood to have a divine aspect. Recently, the idea of the university and of national literature departments is being fundamentally rethought. Said, Bernheimer, Moebius, Reading, Foucault, Spivak, Bauman – to name just a few – have all worried about the place of literature in the light of globalisation, the dominance of Europe in literature departments, and the place of minority discourses. The article suggests that Comparative Literature may be the hope for the future in literary studies, because it is a field that by definition combines linguistic, cultural and political perspectives in its approach to texts. At the same time, however, comparative literature has traditionally been dominated by Eurocentrism, which has been the source of much criticism. Should the dominant languages of Europe be set aside to make room for the less known, less powerful ones? The article sees the European project of community as a source of hope, analogous to comparative literature, in facing both the challenge and cultural wealth of diversity.

This article analyses the recovery of the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War in the last decade, after so many years of silence, forgetfulness and oblivion. Four points are developed: first, how this recovery is achieved by the civil society in general and by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in particular. Secondly, there is a brief allusion to the quarrel between historians and philosophers about the place of memory and remembrance for the construction of the history of Spain. Thirdly, a reference to the recent Historical Memory Law is made, and finally there is a point about the important role played by literature in recovering the memory of many painful facts of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship from the point of view of the victims.

Addressing the ‘topographical turn’ in cultural theory which emphasizes spatial constellations and sites, the article discusses concepts of space both in Anglo-American Cultural Theory and in European Culture Studies in order to develop their differences. Within Cultural Studies the program to ‘spatialize’ historical narratives has created a whole language of symbolic topographical figures which function as a counter-discourse for minorities. To argue against the tendency of translating theories in order to transform them into ‘neutral tools’, independent of their historical origin, the article discusses various space-discourses in European cultural theories; it refers to studies from the current cultural reorientation of the humanities but also to those from the early 20th century to illuminate different relationships between philosophy, historiography and cultural techniques.

Any consideration of English in the context of a literature for Europe prompts the question of whether English can be contained within the paradigm of Europe, whether it could or should ever be restrained from overflowing its edges and boundaries. While English was created from the crucible of European languages, its filiations have long since stretched far beyond the borders of the continent. Close observation of the dynamics of English, and of English Literature, it could be argued, illustrates one reason why contemporary Britain finds it difficult to limit itself to an exclusively European dimension.