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The literature of biology is an expensive tool kept in a library, usually remote from the laboratory. Compared with modern apparatus, it appears absurdly simple. Anyone with three A‐levels can use it. Besides, the funds are separate; even if one saves money on books, one cannot buy another spectrophotometer. It is always someone else who buys books. So the literature has a high cost‐to‐use ratio.

Science would not have been possible without a particular form of communication, which itself has changed over the years. Why has science flourished in our Judeo‐Christian culture and not in others? We have very little idea, but certainly the Gutenberg printing press made the rapid dissemination of scientific work possible. For the first two hundred years of the Royal Society, science was the activity of the gentleman intellectual. In the history of infectious disease, the books and journals of the period 1840–1890 show how fragile science was, and how recent the present‐day scientific paper is. Fact and opinion were intermingled; there was no refereeing as we know it; there was total confusion in the meaning and definition of terms; the presentation of data was long‐winded, repetitious and illogical, with very poor tables and figures; and so on. The professionalism of science has occurred in the past hundred years; if we are not very careful, I think it may well be the last hundred years of science before a return to another dark age.

Authors often accuse journal editors of excessive delays in publishing articles. The interval between acceptance and publication of an article is an average of five months in medicine and nine months from submission to publication in psychology. A further delay, which has received less attention, is the time for delivery of a journal to the library or the delay before index or abstract publications arrive. Delivery times should be small in North America and Western Europe where most journals and secondary publications are produced, but might be much longer for other continents.

A number of informal biological newsletters have a limited circulation. In addition to social news some of these contain information about research in progress, research material, and select bibliographies—these are called research newsletters and an analysis is made of the contents and scope of twenty‐two of them. The bibliographies are of several types and that compiled from the publications of the recipient's newsletter is discussed and its cover compared with that of Biological Abstracts. Suggestions to improve the usefulness of the research newsletters are made.

Before one looks at services intended to make one aware of current progress in science, one should look briefly at the structure of science and at how, and perhaps why, information is generated. It has long been an administrative convenience to divide science into a number of quite well‐defined fields such as biology, physics, chemistry, etc., and to further subdivide these, again largely for administrative reasons. Chemistry, for example, may be divided into inorganic, organic, physical, etc. branches.

The Plaintiff, a self‐employed sales agent, was engaged on 21st November, 1980 by the Defendant, a financial services company selling life assurance and pension policies. The terms of his engagement were contained in two successive contracts of which the latter provided, inter alia, (1) that he should be an independent contractor remunerated by commission payable on premiums generated by business introduced by him; (2) that the relationship between the two parties was that of agent and principal and (3) that that agency was an exclusive one ie the plaintiff was not entitled to act as agent for any other principal. In addition, Clause 10(g) of that contract provided as follows:

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an affective computing-based method of identifying sleeping beauties and their princes in five educational technology journals.

This study develops an information technology-based methodology to analyze sleeping beauties in the field of educational technology. The authors seek to determine the characteristics of studies which trigger the awakening of sleeping beauties (called “princes”). The keywords and Hirsch index (H-index) are used as two essential analysis indicators.

Between 2000 and 2015, these five journals included 7,864 articles with a total of 77,700 citations and 24,312 keywords. This study identified articles as being in deep sleep (75.7 percent), less deep sleep (14.7 percent), and awakening (5.5 percent) states. According to the analytical results, 431 of 7,864 articles are qualified as “sleeping beauties.” Of the 431 sleeping beauties identified, 232 articles were awakened by trend princes, while 286 were awakened by H-index princes. A total of 128 sleeping beauties were awakened by both prince types. Besides, impact factors (IFs) of journals do not have a significant effect on the number of sleeping articles.

There are two main research limitations in this study. The first one is the amount of target journals. Only five well-known educational technology journals are analyzed in this research. There may be more valuable sleeping publications in other journals not been found. The second limitation is that the authors merely pick up the lead author of citing papers as the indicator to determine the H-index prince. The contributions of the rest of authors are not taken are not taken into consideration. These limitations should be further studied.

To the knowledge, this study is the first one reporting the identification of sleeping beauty and princes in educational technology field. Furthermore, the authors devise an informational method to determine sleeping publications, sleeping beauty, and princes. A systematic analysis of five well-known journals in the field of educational technology field confirms the existence of “sleeping beauties.” It is reported that improvements to a journal’s IF are positively correlated to increased numbers of sleeping beauties being awakened. To reduce the number of such articles, or to reduce the overall sleeping duration, journal editors should not only seek to raise the journal’s IF, but also strategically select keywords for maximum visibility, and promote articles to high H-index authors.

User education programmes fall into two categories. They may aim simply to help the student through his course and familiarise him with a single library (short‐term objectives), or to provide a fuller awareness of the generation, role, and use of information which may allow him to research problems in any subsequent professional situation (long‐term objectives). It is argued that the latter are more valuable; the objectives of librarian and student on such courses are discussed in detail. A user education course based on long‐term objectives is described, and its effects on student and library discussed. Finally, the contribution of user education to the “information society” is considered, and user education programmes with long‐term objectives preferred.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

For upwards of a century the Mother of Parliaments has pioneered social and particularly public health legislation all over the world. The parliamentary democracies planted by Mother England in forty new Englands beyond the seas followed our lead. We have grown accustomed to this and it is now something of a shock to find this is no longer completely true. Except perhaps in housing, we do not lead in this field, but seem to be following. It was always said of the law “You cannot legislate in advance of public opinion!” In the control of food purity and quality, public opinion cannot be the arbiter and for it, there has to be substituted research, technology and scientific knowledge. During recent years, this country has tended to follow the U.S.A. in food control legislation; at least that part of it which deals with chemical treatment and food additives. This casts no reflection on the advances made in Britain, but these are neither adequate nor fast enough to keep abreast of the food technological explosion. The vast research programmes in the U.S.A., are better able to do this; their complaint is not of the shortage of money, only of brains. In the taxed‐to‐death, economic wilderness that is now Britain, we have the brains, but no money. It is hardly surprising that those with brains should seek in foreign fields the rewards and appreciation to which they are entitled.