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The paper aims to describe the launching of Georgetown University's Scholarly Communication Symposium Series in 2003, and ongoing efforts to raise faculty and librarian awareness of changes in the scholarly communication landscape.

The paper takes the form of a case study.

Raising awareness about the effects of the “serials crisis” on academic libraries is challenging, because faculty members do not pay subscription costs directly. It remains difficult to encourage researchers to publish in open access journals, which often do not have the prestige of more established, subscription‐based journals. In the face of these challenges, Georgetown's Scholarly Communication Symposium Series has proven to be an enduring vehicle for informing faculty members of the changing landscape in scholarly communications. Targeted marketing (contextualized with reference to high profile developments and projects) and the engaging nature of the events have been critical to success. The broad, high level campus representation among the planning group has also been essential.

The paper allows readers wishing to develop or revise their scholarly communications initiatives to draw on Georgetown's experience.

This paper aims to document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing.

This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as: a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor's calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor.

This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor; measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or web sites through the number of resources that link to them; measures of article downloads and other usage factors; recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group's evaluations pool together collectively; and ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system.

Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone.

To share the major presentations of the 7th International Conference and explore more fully the future of grey literature – what is grey today?

A review of the main topics covered.

The range of papers was extensive and contained examples of information systems and networks, partnering and OAI, role of repositories, document supply and delivery, curriculum and instructional developments, and relationships with many publishing entities.

Of value to information management professionals.

The recent political crisis in the Middle East, coupled with several banking failures, have raised concerns about the safety of this region's banks among potential customers and investors in the international market. This paper presents an analysis of the safety of Middle Eastern banks, using capital strength as a measure of safety. A comparison of the capital strength of Middle Eastern banks with a sample of the world's largest banks and the largest U.S. banks (based on capital) is conducted for the period 1988 to 1992. The results of this study indicate that Middle Eastern banks possess significantly higher capital to assets ratios than both world and U.S. banks, and very few Middle Eastern banks failed to meet the Basel minimum capital ratio during this period.

Service captivity is described as the experience of constrained choice whereby a consumer has no power and feels unable to exit a service relationship. This study aims to explore how positive service experiences can contribute to service captivity in the alternative financial services (AFS) sector for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability.

A total of 31 interviews were undertaken with Australian consumers of payday loans and/or consumer leases.

The authors reveal a typology of consumers based on their financial vulnerability and their experience with AFS providers. Then they present three themes relating to how the marketing practices of these providers create a positive service experience, and, in doing so, can contribute to service captivity for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability.

The benefits derived from positive service experiences, including accessible solutions, self-esteem, and a sense of control over their financial situation, contribute to the service captivity of some consumers, rendering alternative avenues less attractive.

AFS providers must ensure a socially responsible approach to their marketing practices to minimize potentially harmful outcomes for consumers. However, a systems-level approach is needed to tackle the wider issue of financial precarity. Policymakers need to address the marketplace gaps, regulatory frameworks and social welfare policies that contribute to both vulnerability and captivity.

This research extends the understanding of service captivity by demonstrating how positive service experiences can perpetuate this situation. Further, specific solutions are proposed at each level of the service system to address service captivity in the AFS sector.

This study investigates how bank competition affects financial stability and whether government intervention contributes to shaping this relationship in North African countries.

A review of the literature on the subject was conducted, combined with an empirical analysis that used a two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) and a sample of 45 banks operating in North African countries over the period 2005–2019.

The findings reveal a quadratic relationship between competition and banking stability in North African countries. Competition–stability view and competition–fragility view could be applied at the same time for North African banks. Additionally, in this context, results highlight a negative impact of government intervention on financial stability in a competitive financial sector. North African banks operating in a high government intervention quality environment tend to engage in high-risk investments. Robustness checks with alternative measures of competition and banking stability also show consistent results.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the North African context has been explored to determine the role of the quality of government intervention in the relationship between competition and banking system fragility. This paper seeks to cover the shadow field in existing literature through further new information. Thus, it contributes to the emerging market banking literature by showing that both high and low levels of competition can improve financial stability in North African countries. Moreover, it expands its contribution by displaying the moderator effect of intervention quality on the bank competition–stability relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the model of an financial intelligence unit (FIU) and the availability of resources of an FIU on the strength of the anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) legal framework and the overall effectiveness of the AML/CFT regime.

The authors use FIU specific characteristics to measure the impact on the developed AML/CFT Compliance Index (Jayasekara, 2020a) and AML/CFT Effectiveness Index (Jayasekara, 2020b) in measuring the overall effectiveness of an AML/CFT regime. In addition, the impact of an AML/CFT regime on the cost to exports and gross domestic product are modeled.

The empirical results suggest that the model of an FIU is an important determinant of an effective AML/CFT regime. The administrative model of FIU shows a negative relationship with the overall effectiveness of the AML/CFT regime. The availability of resources which was measured in terms of human resources at FIUs shows a significant positive relationship with the effectiveness. However, the model of an FIU and the availability of resources of an FIU are not significant determinants of a sound AML/CFT legal framework. The results further reveal that effective AML/CFT regimes promote economic growth and also international trade by reducing the cost of exports. Therefore, policymakers are required to reassess the administrative model FIU of the country and have to adopt a suitable model which has been assigned more power to implement the regime.

This study was initially designed to capture more FIU specific variables using a questionnaire to widen the scope of the study. However, the low response rate to the questionnaire forced us to rely on publicly available data on FIU characteristics. Therefore, appropriate FIU specific variables may be developed in future research based on this foundation.

This paper is an original work done by the author that discusses the FIU specific characteristics on the overall strength and effectiveness of AML/CFT regimes and further extends the use of originally designed AML/CFT Compliance Index and AML/CFT Effectiveness Index.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effect of induced capital regulatory pressure on banks’ charter value and risk-taking, and the influence of bank’s charter value on its risk-taking under such a capital regulatory pressure.

The authors use two different estimations to check the robustness of the results. First, they apply a two-stage least squares mode to estimate the impact of capital requirements and bank charter value on bank risk-taking, with the influence of capital regulatory and market-force variables on bank charter value. Second, to reduce the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, the authors use dynamic panel data techniques as a check for robustness.

The empirical results show that higher capital requirements pressure brings about a lower charter value for banks, which in turn increases their risk-taking. The issue of banks’ risk-taking is also affected by their size: large banks seem to be more stable than their smaller counterparts.

The authors’ findings suggest that regulatory pressure has had the desired impact on insolvency risk for Chinese banks due to the expected penalty triggered by a breach of capital requirements.

It is the first paper that investigates the impact of capital regulatory pressure on risk-taking of the Chinese banking system, which sheds light on concerns about regulatory monitoring of bank risk and capital regulatory framework.

This paper measures the impact of capital regulation on Chinese bank charter value and risk-taking and offers some support for the implementation of Basel III in China.

The authors have constructed different measures of regulatory pressure to investigate the influence of new capital regulatory regime on banks’ behavior. Most importantly, the exogenous changes of banks’ capital ratio induced by capital regulatory pressure during the past decade that provides a unique opportunity to directly analyze the impact of capital regulatory pressure on bank charter value and risk-taking.

Analysis of the trade-off between competition and financial stability has been at the center of academic and policy debate for over two decades and especially since the 2007-2008 global financial crises. This study aims to provide particular attention to the Islamic banking system which principally involves with the riba-free instruments as compared to the conventional interest-based system. The results show that an increase in the concentration in the conventional banking sector can lead to the deterioration of stability through the increased prices. For Islamic banks, an increase of the market power can positively affect the banking stability.

Two complementary approaches, namely, one-step generalized method of moment (GMM) system analysis and panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) framework, were applied.

The results show the same effect of Islamic and conventional banks’ market power on banking soundness; yet, a different effect is displayed with non-performing loans (NPLs). In particular, the “competition–fragility” assumption for both banking industries is supported when considering z-score as the dependent variable. Including NPLs, this postulation is still approved for conventional banks; however, the “competition–stability” postulation is supported for Islamic banks.

The existent literature was scarcely interested in exploring the concept of competitivity in the context of Islamic banking sector as compared to the conventional one by applying two complementary approaches, namely, GMM and PVAR. This later allows to test the effect and the feedback effect of the competition and stability concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the market power and the efficiency-stability of Islamic and conventional banks in the MENA zone and South East Asia during the 2005-2012 period.

The author applied an empirical approach in two steps. First, the author estimates the Lerner indicator, which is a measure of competition. Then, this measure is regressed and other explanatory variables on the banking “stability-efficiency” are derived simultaneously from the estimation of a stability stochastic frontier.

The author concludes that increased competition in the Islamic banking sector promotes the overall banking stability. Besides, whether there is a low or high competitiveness, the size of an Islamic bank is positively related to financial stability. However, large conventional banks operating in market with limited competitiveness become more involved in the risk behavior. The author concludes that capitalization has a positive effect on stability only in case of low competitiveness.

The originality of this research lies in the application of the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) on the Z-score indicator. This methodology enables to take into account the differences between the current and the optimum stability that each bank can achieve, thus creating a new measure of financial stability called “efficiency-stability”.