Rejuvenating Green OA for a Greener Pasture

This paper is a critical sequel to John Dove’s paper titled “Maximum Dissemination: A possible model for society journals in the humanities and social sciences to support Open while retaining their subscription revenue”, presented at the Charleston Conference 2019. Dove’s OA advocacy has included both gold and green. Dove’s innovative model, which makes full use of the green route to achieve maximum dissemination of authors’ works through open repositories, suggests a switch in the functional responsibility for depositing author’s manuscript from author to publisher. The model has publishers to act as agents of the authors as much through the green route as their subscription route. Dove has suggested this maximum use of the green path by the publisher for specific journals in specific disciplines. This paper looks to examine the feasibility of green OA model in this context, and then to consider other ways to expand on this idea to other green OA supporting publishers. It further looks at the possibilities of the model driving the re-emergence of green OA as a favoured option for facilitating immediate and parallel dissemination of authors’ papers through both green and subscription channels.

The Political Psychology of Citizen Satisfaction: Does Functional Responsibility Matter?

The provision of public services is a key responsibility of elected politicians. Research suggests that citizens’ satisfaction evaluations of public services are incomplete representations of service quality and performance. However, little attention has been given to the political nature of service evaluations. Based on the theory of (partisan) motivated reasoning and the literature on responsibility attribution, we argue that citizens provide more favorable evaluations of municipal services when the responsibility for these services is vested in political principals with matching partisanship. Drawing on original data from a two-wave pre-post panel survey of Danish voters in the 2017 municipal elections, we employ a difference-in-differences estimator to identify the effect of a partisan match between voters and elected municipal leaders on citizen satisfaction with municipal services. We furthermore nest a survey experiment in the panel survey to test whether partisan bias in citizen satisfaction emerges when the line of functional responsibility between political principals and public services is clear and not dispersed across multiple actors. Our findings provide support for the hypothesis of partisan bias in satisfaction evaluations. We further demonstrate the importance of clarity of responsibility; partisan bias seems to come into being when the functional responsibility of municipal leaders for public services is clear and not dispersed across multiple actors, pointing toward a possible mechanism of partisan bias in citizen satisfaction.

Balancing the Dual Responsibilities of Business Unit Controllers: Field and Survey Evidence

ABSTRACT: We examine how business unit (BU) controllers balance their dual roles of providing information for both local decision-making (local responsibility) and corporate control (functional responsibility). The existing literature suggests that organizations can improve the quality of financial reporting and internal controls by increasing the emphasis on the functional responsibility of BU controllers. In this study, we rely on prior literature and insights from field interviews to argue that such an increase also leads to role ambiguity and conflict, which in turn can lead to an increased tolerance of data misreporting. We test our predictions using survey responses of 134 BU controllers. As predicted, we find that the emphasis on the functional responsibility of BU controllers is positively associated with role conflict and role ambiguity, both of which are related to data misreporting at the BU level.

Determination of Essential and Variable Residues in Pediocin PA-1 by NNK Scanning

ABSTRACT Pediocin PA-1 is an antimicrobial peptide (called bacteriocin) that shows inhibitory activity against the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. To elucidate which residue(s) is responsible for this function, the antimicrobial activities of pediocin PA-1 mutants were evaluated and compared. Each of the 44 native codons was replaced with the NNK triplet oligonucleotide in a technique termed NNK scanning, and 35 mutations at each position were examined for antimicrobial activities using a modified colony overlay screening method. As a consequence, the functional responsibility of each residue was estimated by counting the number of active mutants, allowing us to identify candidate essential/variable residues. Activity was abrogated by many of the mutations at residues Y2, G6, C9, C14, C24, W33, G37, and C44, indicating that these residues may be essential. In contrast, activity was retained by almost all versions harboring mutations at K1, T8, G10, S13, G19, N28, and N41, indicating that these are functionally redundant residues. Sequence analysis revealed that only the wild type was active and 14 and 11 substitutions were inactive at G6 and C14, respectively, while 12 and 11 substitutions were active and 2 and 0 substitutions were inactive at T8 and K1, respectively. These findings suggest that NNK scanning is effective for determining essential and variable residues in pediocin PA-1, leading to an elucidation of structure-function relationships and to improvements in the antimicrobial function efficiently by peptide engineering.