A Foreign Monopoly is Broken

Is scholarly publishing becoming a monopoly ?

In August this year the Financial Times reported that Wolters Kluwer ( [http://www.wolters-kluwer.com/] ), the Dutch publisher, was considering a bid for Harcourt General ( [http://www.harcourt.com/] ), the US textbook producer [1]. Wolters Kluwer is the third largest commercial professional publisher in the world with a 1998 revenue of over US$2,380 million [2]. Harcourt is sixth largest with ...

Is It “Fractured” or “Broken”? A Patient Survey Study to Assess Injury Comprehension after Orthopedic Trauma

the bone is “fractured” or “broken”. While orthopaedic surgeons consider these terms synonymous, patients appear tocomprehend the terms as having different meanings. Given the commonality of this frequently posed question, it may beimportant for providers to assess patients’ level of understanding in order to provide optimal care. The purpose of thisstudy is to evaluate patients’ comprehension ...

Authorship is broken.

Runner-up patents: is monopoly inevitable?

Exclusive patents sacrifice product competition to provide firms incentives to innovate. We characterize an alternative mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first inventor. These runner-up patents increase social welfare under very general conditions. Furthermore, we show that the time window during which later in...

A Broken Metallic Tracheostomy Tube