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Many countries are looking for ways to enable students to engage more effectively with PhD study. This paper aims to consider the effects of explicit discipline-specific research skill development embedded in multiple semesters of an undergraduate degree on PhD preparedness.

This case study of one Bachelor of Health Science programme determined the effectiveness of the implementation of a conceptual model, the Researcher Skill Development framework, across the undergraduate degree programme. Data were gathered through interviews of 9 academic staff and 14 students in their fourth year of undergraduate study, which is a research-focused year.

All students and academics stated the benefits of the use of the Researcher Skill Development framework in undergraduate study including: deepening metacognition of research processes; assisting students toward acting and thinking like researchers; and the research-capacity building of the school. While all academics and all but one student recommended that the framework be used early in the degree programme, a number of interviewees specified problems with the existing implementation of the framework.

While the results are not generalisable, the approach is worth studying in other degree programme-wide contexts to determine its broader capacity to enable students to be more research ready for PhD study when compared to current practice.

When adapted to the context, whole-of-degree research skill development may enable developing countries to have more students and developed countries to better prepared students commencing PhD studies.

No studies currently provide results for explicit research skill development across a degree programme, or of the benefits of this approach for PhD preparation.

The inaugural meeting of the newly established National Party was held in the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, on Thursday, October 25th, under the presidency of Admiral Lord Beresford. There was a large and distinguished audience numbering about 3,000 persons, among those on the platform being Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Brigadier‐General Page Croft, M.P., Mr. Havelock Wilson, Miss Constance Williams, the Hon. G. J. Jenkins (all of whom addressed the meeting), Earl Bathurst, Sir C. Allom, Major Alan Burgoyne, M.P., Colonel Cassal, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Sir R. Cooper, M.P., Capt. Viscount Duncannon, M.P., Sir W. Earnshaw Cooper, Mr. H. A. Gwynne, Mr. Rowland Hunt, M.P., Lieut.‐Col. Lord Leconfield, Lord Leith of Fyvie, Admiral Sir H. Markham, The Earl of Northesk, Colonel R. H. Rawson, M.P., Lord Edward St. Maur, Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, Lord Stafford and others.

To explore the status, interests, and intentions of peer reviewers and how editors enlist and muster these factors to enhance the prestige of a scholarly publication.

Case study: use of a 30‐year accumulation of editorial office records of one scholarly journal to analyze the contents of peer review comments and correspondence; direct quotes highlight key themes.

Peer reviewers labor to obtain more than the certification, authentication, and quality of individual works. The volume and variety of commentary generated by a double‐blind peer review process reveal concerns behind reviewer comments to authors and effects over time.

The study centers on one journal, Libraries & Culture, a publication committed to the specialized, interdisciplinary research about the history of libraries and the collection of cultural records.

The strategic nature of the administration and management of the invisible work of peer reviewers becomes more apparent. The interests and intentions of peer reviewers surface in commentary intended only for authors. Commentary relates to a variety of themes including personal interests, pedagogical and disciplinary objectives, field expansion agendas as well as the prestige of the publication. These themes suggest peer review as a potentially effective guiding mechanism for long‐term endeavors that benefit author, reviewer, and editor as interrelated players in arenas where distinction is at stake.

Merchants and manufacturers have it in their power to minimise in some degree the extent to which we are becoming indebted to foreign countries in respect of the large excess of imports over exports, by obtaining, as far as possible, their imported supplies of food products and raw materials for industries from countries within the Empire. Take, for example, meat and cheese. The prevailing high prices are no doubt encouraging the home production of these commodities. Nevertheless a large quantity must necessarily be imported. In 1914 meat to the value of 62 million pounds was imported, and cheese to the value of 8 million pounds. Of the imports of meat 26 per cent. came from within the Empire, and of cheese 82 per cent. Clearly it is better under existing circumstances that we should buy meat from Australia and New Zealand than from Argentina, and cheese from Canada and New Zealand rather than from Holland and the United States. Many other examples may be mentioned of products which can equally as well be obtained within the Empire as from foreign countries, such as maize from South Africa, where a large increase of production is expected this year; oats from Canada rather than from Argentina and the United States; barley from Canada; peas from New Zealand; butter from Australia and New Zealand; canned salmon, of which 2½ million pounds' worth was imported in 1914, from Canada rather than from the United States; apples from Canada and Australia; wine from Australia; tea from India and Ceylon rather than from China and Java; cocoa from the Gold Coast and the West Indies; copra from Malaya, India and Australia; rubber from Malaya and Ceylon; fibres from New Zealand, Mauritius, Ceylon, etc.; wood pulp from Canada and Newfoundland; wool from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falkland Islands rather than from Argentina, Chile and other foreign sources; tanning materials from India, Natal, Australia and British East Africa; dyewoods from the West Indies; timber from Canada; hardwoods from India, West Africa, the West Indies and Australia; copper and copper ore from Australia and South Africa; tin and tin ore from Malaya, Nigeria, South Africa and Australia; manganese from India; plumbago from Ceylon; hides from India, Africa and Australia, and so forth. It has been stated that the result of the war may ultimately depend largely on financial strength. In that case the country which is to the greatest extent self‐supporting as regards supplies of the necessaries of life and materials for the manufacture of munitions of war will be in a position to carry on the longest. Undoubtedly the British Empire contains within itself the power to produce all such materials, and the Dominions, Colonies and Dependencies are in fact already supplying a large proportion of the food products and raw materials for industries, which are imported into the United Kingdom. There are a few notable exceptions, e.g., for our supplies of cotton and sugar we have always been largely dependent on foreign countries, but Uganda and the Soudan are capable of producing in the future very large quantities of cotton of the quality required by Lancashire spinners, and sugar production in our Colonies could, with proper encouragement, be expanded so as to meet the whole of the requirements of the Mother Country. If the British capital and energy which have in the past gone every year to the development of enterprises in foreign countries had been devoted for a tew years exclusively to exploiting the resources of the Dominions and Colonies, the British Empire would, by this time, have become practically self‐supporting, and the bulk of our imported foodstuffs and raw products required for our manufacturing industries would now be obtained from within the Empire and paid for by increased quantities of our own manufactures. It may be hoped that one of the lessons which we shall learn from the war will be definitely to encourage the development of the vast resources of our overseas Empire. — The Chamber of Commerce Journal.

Knowledge reuse using electronic repositories, while increasingly important, requires more thorough analysis. Service modularity has been recently applied in services research but has not been integrated into knowledge reuse studies. The purpose of this paper is to draw on both service modularity and knowledge reuse to develop and validate a framework that categorises forms of packaged knowledge in an electronic repository.

Drawing on knowledge reuse and service modularity research, a model is proposed. The model is empirically tested using a case study research design.

This research highlighted the value of including both context and process as key dimensions when packaging service knowledge for reuse. This study identifies knowledge types present in modular solutions and how they were configured and reconfigured in the knowledge repository. This research identified five ways modularised services were leveraged. In addition to the traditional scale and stretch approaches, already present, but conflated, in the service literature, three other configurations were identified; shrink, separate and segment.

The findings are based on a single empirical case study which may limit the generalisability of the findings. There is a need for additional research to further validate the model in additional contexts.

This study provides managers with empirical examples of how a modular repository was used in practice and outlines five ways of recombining contextual and processual elements to enable service codification and reuse. It has implications for how knowledge is decomposed and recombined in repositories, suggesting an explicit separation of context and process knowledge while developing modular elements within both.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that explicitly uses context and process as dimensions and draws on service modularity to understand types of knowledge reuse in electronic repositories. In doing so, it adds value by developing and validating a model that identifies five types of reuse.

Describes the proposed “a history of the book in Britain” project to be published in seven volumes by Cambridge University Press. Describes the background to the project in relation to the disparate nature of studies of the history of the book in Britain and work already done. Presents an outline of the structure of the proposed publication.

With the present issue the British Food Journal enters upon the fortieth year of its existence. The policy of the Journal has always been to expose and to assist in the suppression of adulteration and sophistication, to support the interests of Public Analysts, Medical Officers of Health, and Inspectors in the carrying out of their official duties, to be of service to all who are interested in or in any way associated with the administration of the various Acts relating to food, and to protect honest manufacturers and producers against competition from inferior or adulterated products.

The following address has been sent to the President of the French Republic :—

The factories are instructed as to what kinds of pack they are to produce, and their product is controlled by samples sent at specified times to the research laboratory. With greater and less attention to detailed steps the whole of agriculture and the food industry in Italy is so controlled. In Germany can be noted as an example the development on a large scale of the fishing industry in the Baltic—the scrapping of the privately‐owned small fishing boats in that sea—the launching of large vessels with their factory vessels in attendance— the keenness with which every step in the development of fish preservation has been followed—the official tests on such methods as the American Birdseye Quick Freezing, the German Heckerman process, the English Z process, and the building and the equipping of the large factories where the whole of the waste fish products are worked up into edible and useful products. This last is the keynote of the German system : waste nothing. The recovery of waste fats has been practised in Germany in an intensive fashion for several years. There have been in Germany other changes of a more subtle character, and not so obvious to the outside world. The food laws of Germany were such that the nation could be justly proud of them, but for some time there has been a distinct slackening of the control—as for example in the use of preservatives. These were strictly limited in kind and number—but even before the present phase the blind eye of the official had often been turned towards the use of disallowed preservatives and I am given to understand that certain chemicals, erstwhile forbidden, can now be used officially. It may be policy for our Ministry of Health to aid in the present critical situation by relaxing some of the regulations at present in force. Those preservatives to be released would not in any way lower the nutritional value of the foods, nor would there be allowed any of those preservatives against which a case has been made in respect of their physiological action. The impetus given to research work by totalitarian states should be an inspiration to the democracies. One of the first things the Italian Government took in hand after their conquest of Abyssinia was a scientific survey of the natural products of the country. A recent issue of Nature states that the first number of a new official Italian journal contains the results of the first three years' work on the fish of the inland waters of the former Ethiopia. As Nature points out, the far greater areas of British Eastern Africa have been subjected simply to spasmodic and short‐termed scientific examinations, chiefly resulting from the initiative of private individuals or of institutions. It is to be stressed, however, that the stimulus given to scientific studies of food production and manufacture both in Germany and Italy was activated by abnormal conditions. In neither the one nor the other can it be said that the development was a natural one—in both it was originated by the desire of the government to make the country as self‐sufficient as possible in case of war, and therefore the whole idea was abnormal and biased. In this country and in the United States the development has followed much sounder lines. In this country the standard of living has become remarkably high, although perhaps somewhat lop‐sided. One might quote the example of bread. The loaf as we know it to‐day is made almost wholly from wheat flour, derived from that portion of the wheat kernel which gives the whitest flour. The Ministry of Health has, I think, been very properly concerned to maintain our high standard and has looked with disfavour on flours which, in order to simulate that particular white portion of the wheat grain, have been bleached. America is the only other country in the world where the people demand white loaves of such delicate and even texture. There much be something very attractive to the public in this type of loaf: some of us remember the fiasco of the standard bread, and members of the bakery trade know what a small proportion of their sales are concerned with brown loaves. The general character of the bread in continental European countries is very different; even the delightful loaves of France, generally well baked, are dark in comparison, although in no sense “ brown ” or “ whole‐meal.” In most countries flours other than wheat are incorporated. We may have to incorporate potato‐flour, but if this is done in any large quantity the resultant loaf has an entirely different texture. It is obvious that the dividing line between the scope of agriculture and that of the food industry is essentially ill‐defined. The importance, however, of the pre‐industrial treatment is such that it is really impossible to dissociate the scientific work of the agriculturalist from that of the industrialist. To quote examples :— Under the aegis of the Food Investigation Board a study has been made of the production of bacon in this country, with remarkably successful results to the farmer, to the bacon‐curer and to the consumer. Similarly the extensive series of experiments carried out by the Food Investigation Board on the storage of fruit has had great success, and the economic effect on the fruit trade, not only here, but also in the Dominions and Colonies cannot be estimated at the moment. An agricultural study of great importance to the housewife was undertaken by the Potato Marketing Board; this was concerned with the blackening of potatoes and was unfortunately not concluded when the war brought a sudden halt to the work. The problem of obtaining “ figures ” for characteristics of food is the most difficult with which the chemist has to deal. There is no method by which palatability can be registered, for it is compounded of many factors which themselves are not possible of measurement. Flavour, appearance and edibility are all concerned. It is comparatively simple to connect softness on the palate of a cream centre of a chocolate with the size of the grain of the sugar crystals, or the smoothness of an ice cream with the size of the ice‐crystals, but to express the texture of a cake in terms measuring the reaction of the palate, or the toughness or tenderness of a beef‐steak are far more difficult. This last example has been considered in some detail. Much work has been done at the Low Temperature Station at Cambridge on methods of judging the tenderness of meat. There is no simple method of reproducing the complicated movement of the jaws in mastication—but the consumer of the steak judges the tenderness by the reactions of his jaws to the muscle fibre, and the problem is complicated by the fact that the judgment of a person with a denture is entirely different from that of a person with his natural teeth; it has been estimated, for example, that the pressure which can be applied during mastication is only, even by those with the most perfect denture, one tenth that of normal. A somewhat complicated instrument has been designed and constructed at the Research Station at Karlsruhe in order to make possible investigations on the problem of the toughness of meat. Sufficient data have not yet been accumulated to pass judgment on its efficiency but it appears to be the most satisfactory attempt yet made to enable definite measurements of the toughness of meat to be determined. These are but examples of the general trend of scientific work in food production and manufacture, examples of the range of subjects and problems being attacked with an ever increasing vigour.