The structures that govern society’s understanding of information have been reorganised under a neoliberal worldview to allow information to appear and function as a commodity. This has implications for the professional ethics of library and information labour, and the need for critical reflexivity in library and information praxes is not being met. A lack of theoretical understanding of these issues means that the political interests governing decision-making are going unchallenged, for example the UK government’s specific framing of open access to research. We argue that building stronger, community oriented praxes of critical depth can serve as a resilient challenge to the neoliberal politics of the current higher education system in the UK and beyond. Critical information literacy offers a proactive, reflexive and hopeful strategy to challenge hegemonic assumptions about information as a commodity.

Research Support services are becoming increasingly invested in by universities, particularly within their library services. However, the wider context in which institutions operate is yielding significant challenges, including fiscal volatility and an increasingly embedded marketisation.This paper considers some of the challenges and opportunities that face libraries in small and historically teaching-led institutions that are trying to develop their research support operations within this context.

The terms 'open' and 'openness' are widely used across the current higher education environment particularly in the areas of repository services and scholarly communications. Open-access licensing and open-source licensing are two prevalent manifestations of open culture within higher education research environments. As theoretical ideals, open-licensing models aim at openness and academic freedom. But operating as they do within the context of global neoliberalism, to what extent are these models constructed by, sustained by, and co-opted by neoliberalism? In this paper, we interrogate the use of open-licensing within scholarly communications and within the larger societal context of neoliberalism. Through synthesis of various sources, we will examine how open access licensing models have been constrained by neoliberal or otherwise corporate agendas, how open access and open scholarship have been reframed within discourses of compliance, how open-source software models and software are co-opted by politico-economic forces, and how the language of 'openness' is widely misused in higher education and repository services circles to drive agendas that run counter to actually increasing openness. We will finish by suggesting ways to resist this trend and use open-licensing models to resist neoliberal agendas in open scholarship.

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Travel planning is increasingly done using assistive travel planning technologies. These technologies, however, tend to focus on the traveller as an individual, while travelling can often be a social endeavour involving other people. In order to explore the influence of other people on travelling behaviour, nineteen participants from the city of Ghent, Belgium, took part in a diary study and a subsequent interview. Our results show that the social context of certain travelling behaviours can influence the three main components that make up a displacement (i.e. the route, the departure time and the mode of transportation). Additionally, other aspects of the displacement, such as activities during the displacement, can also be influenced by a social travelling context. We propose that travel planning and travel assistance software could benefit from efforts to incorporate the social aspects of travelling into their systems and offer some suggestions.

The multidimensional analysis of ceilings for industrial growth was first formulated in a Spanish document co-authored by Valentina Borremans and myself and submitted as a guideline for a meeting of two dozen Chilean socialists and other Latin Americans at CIDOC (the Center for Intercultural Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The next version was presented at the Zeno Symposium organized by Professor Richard Wollheim in Cyprus.