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The paper examines the European copyright framework and its interaction with open access repositories. Access to information resources has become a modern necessity that needs to be met to share equitably the wealth of the European society. The Directives with intellectual property provisions to enhance copyright law policy makers are the foundation of the European copyright regime. This statement helps me to clarify the design and assumptions underlying open access practice in Europe. The paper analyses strengths and short-comings of these Directives in relation to copyright protection and open access practice among European member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the propensity to approve a random proposal of a large committee that makes decisions by weighted voting. The approach is a generalized version of James Coleman’s “power of a collectivity to act”. Throughout the paper it is assumed that the voters are of two kinds: a fixed (possibly empty) set of “major” (big) voters with fixed weights, and an ever-increasing number of “minor” (small) voters, whose total weight is also fixed, but where each individual’s weight becomes negligible. As our main result, we obtain that asymptotically many minor voters act like a modification of the quota for the vote among major voters. The paper estimates the rate of convergence which turns out to be very high if the weight distribution among the small voters is not too skewed. The results obtained are illustrated by evaluating the decision rules for the Council of Ministers of the EU for various scenarios of EU enlargement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic 'politics of regret', the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed 'postnational' approaches-specifically in the context of European integration-and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a 'European ethics of memory'). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational 'essence', most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national comparisons generally show large differences in life satisfaction of individuals within and between European countries. This paper addresses the question of whether and how job quality and working conditions contribute to the quality of life of employed populations in nine strategically selected EU countries: Finland, Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Using data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2003, we examine relationships between working conditions and satisfaction with life, as well as whether spillover or segmentation mechanisms better explain the link between work domain and overall life satisfaction. Results show that the level of life satisfaction varies significantly across countries, with higher quality of life in more affluent societies. However, the impact of working conditions on life satisfaction is stronger in Southern and Eastern European countries. Our study suggests that the issue of security, such as security of employment and pay which provides economic security, is the key element that in a straightforward manner affects people's quality of life. Other working conditions, such as autonomy at work, good career prospects and an interesting job seem to translate into high job satisfaction, which in turn increases life satisfaction indirectly. In general, bad-quality jobs tend to be more 'effective' in worsening workers' perception of their life conditions than good jobs are in improving their quality of life. We discuss the differences in job-related determinants of life satisfaction between the countries and consider theoretical and practical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embracing the Russian Federation since 2003, the Bologna process is no longer exclusively confined to western European countries. As early as 1999, Vladimir Putin declared the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Lithuania and Poland, as a potential pilot region for intensified cooperation between Russia and the EU on a number of policy areas, including higher education. In this paper, we study whether the Bologna process has served to underpin these ambitions. With a view to the EU, we will ask to what extent the European Union has proffered a model or directly influenced the path for transformation of Kaliningrad’s higher education system. We argue that a number of Kaliningrad-based actors in higher education have recognized the salience of European models and the need to work closely with partners from the EU, while Moscow only allows for marginal discretion in terms of Kaliningrad’s higher educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU)’s Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires that all Member States participate in intercalibration exercises in order to ensure that ecological status concepts and assessment levels are consistent across the EU. This paper describes one such exercise, performed by the countries in the Central/Baltic Geographical Intercalibration Group stretching from Ireland in the west to Estonia in the east and from the southern parts of Scandinavia to the northern regions of Spain and Italy (but excluding alpine regions, which were intercalibrated separately). In this exercise, methods used to measure ecological status of rivers using benthic diatoms were compared. Ecological status is estimated as the ratio between the observed value of a biological element and the value expected in the absence of significant human impact. Approaches to defining the ‘reference sites’, from which these ‘expected’ values were derived, varied from country to country. Minimum criteria were established as part of the exercise but there was still considerable variation between national reference values, reflecting typological differences that could not be resolved during the exercise. A simple multimetric index was developed to compare boundary values using two widely used diatom metrics. Boundary values for high/good status and good/moderate status set by each participant were converted to their equivalent values of this intercalibration metric using linear regression. Variation of ±0.05 EQR units around the median value was considered to be acceptable and the exercise provided a means for those Member States who fell significantly above or below this line to review their approaches and, if necessary, adjust their boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing complexity of policy problems, coupled with the political desire to base new policies on the foundation of firm evidence, has accelerated the development of policy assessment tools. These range from complex computer models and cost benefit analysis through simple checklists and decision trees. In the last decade, many governments have established formal policy assessment systems to harness these tools in order to facilitate more evidence-based policy making. These tools are potentially widely available, but to what extent are they used by policy makers and what becomes of the evidence that they generate? This paper addresses these questions by studying the empirical patterns of tool use across 37 cases in three European countries and the European Commission. It uses a simple classification of tools into advanced, formal and simple types. It finds that even when tools are embedded in policy assessment systems, their use is differentiated and on the whole very limited, in particular when it comes to more advanced tools. It then explores these patterns from contrasting theoretical perspectives to shed light on why, when and how different policy assessment tools are used in the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant changes in the climatic system have been observed, which may be attributed to human-enhanced greenhouse effect. Even stronger changes are projected for the future, impacting in an increasing way on human activity sectors. The present contribution, prepared in the framework of the MICE (Modelling the Impact of Climate Extremes) Project of the European Union, reviews how climate change may impact on winter tourism in the Alpine region, intense precipitation and flood potential in central Europe, forest damage in Scandinavia and beach holidays in the Mediterranean coast. Impacts are likely to be serious and largely adverse. Due to a lack of adequate information and lack of broadly accepted and reliable mathematical models describing the impact of changes in climate extremes on these activity sectors, it has been found useful to use expert judgement based impact assessment. Accordingly, regional mini-workshops were organized serving as platforms for communication between scientists and stakeholders, vehicles for dissemination of the state-of-the-art of the scientific understanding and for learning stakeholders’ view on extreme events, their impacts and the preparedness system. Stakeholders had the opportunity to react to the scientific results and to reflect on their perception of the likely impacts of projected changes in extremes on relevant activity sectors and the potential to adapt and avert adverse consequences. The results reported in this paper present the stakeholders’ suggestions for essential information on different extreme event impacts and their needs from science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment rates, as well as income per capita, differ vastly across the regions of Europe. Labour mobility can play a role in resolving regional disparities. This paper focuses on the questions of why labour mobility is low in the EU and how it is possible that it remains low. We explore whether changes in male and female labour participation act as an important alternative adjustment mechanism. We answer this question in the affirmative. We argue that female labour participation is very important in adjusting to regional disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most recent studies on poverty and inequality in developed countries focus on income. In contrast, this paper presents trends in consumption-based poverty and inequality in nine member countries of the European Union. During the 1980s, both poverty and inequality increased in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium, while decreases in both poverty and inequality are observed for Spain and Portugal. In Greece only inequality increased. For most countries for which income-based results are available, these move in the same direction as the consumption-based results. However, this sensitivity analysis yields considerable differences in the ranking of countries and the magnitude of the changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]