Open Access' main goal is not the subversion of publishers' role as driving actors in an oligopolistic market characterized by reduced competition and higher prices. OA's main function is to be found somewhere else, namely in the ability to subvert the power to control science's governance and its future directions (Open Science), a power that is more often found within the academic institutions rather than outside. By decentralizing and opening-up not just the way in which scholarship is published but also the way in which it is assessed, OA removes the barriers that helped turn science into an intellectual oligopoly even before an economic one. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society. Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more "informed" and effective. This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how this impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.
The measurement of banking output (and therefore productivity) has long been controversial. This article applies the user cost approach in Fixler and Zieschang (1999) to quarterly reporting data from Luxembourg's banking sector. This requires associating the flows in the profit-and-loss account to different assets and liabilities in the balance sheet. The user cost of each asset/liability is then calculated as the difference between the rate at which it generates revenues/costs and a "reference rate" representing the opportunity cost of funds. A negative user cost then identifies an asset or liability as an output and a positive user cost identifies it as an input in the production process. In theory, this datadriven approach is capable of combining elements of both the two traditional approaches to measuring banking output (the production and intermediation approaches) since these classify inputs and outputs on an a priori basis. In practice, our results suggest that neither of these conventional approaches is wholly consistent with the data for Luxembourg. We then use multilateral Törnqvist indices to aggregate outputs and inputs separately and show that the resulting series are robust to alternative measures of the reference rate. The difference between the output and input index provides a measure of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and an implicit price index is also derived. Results suggest that productivity growth in Luxembourg's banking sector has been high since the mid-1990s, displaying volatile but persistent dynamics and moving pro-cyclically. Productivity varies widely across banks but larger banks (in terms of total assets) tend to be more productive.
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