Between 2022 and 2024, LexisNexis migrated its customers with subscriptions to LexisLibrary and/or LexisPSL to the new Lexis+ UK platform. In order to assess the overall migration experience, identify challenges faced during the migration and suggest areas for improvement, the BIALL Supplier Liaison Group (SLG) conducted a survey in mid-2024 to gather feedback from members on their experiences of the project. During the summer of 2024, the SLG committee members analysed the results of the survey and put together the report, referenced in this article, that was circulated to BIALL members in October 2024. Lauren Cummings, Ann O’Sullivan and Andrew Thatcher wrote this piece based on the survey results, the report and the subsequent meeting with LexisNexis.

In this paper, we investigate Frobenius eigenvalues of the compactly supported rigid cohomology of a variety defined over a finite field with q elements, using Dwork’s method. Our study yields several arithmetic consequences. First, we establish that the zeta functions of a set of related affine varieties can reveal all Frobenius eigenvalues of the rigid cohomology of the variety up to a Tate twist. This result does not seem to be known for the $\ell$-adic cohomology. As a second application, we provide several q-divisibility lower bounds for the Frobenius eigenvalues of the rigid cohomology of the variety, in terms of the dimension and multi-degrees of the defining equations. These divisibility bounds for rigid cohomology are generally better than what is suggested from the best known divisibility bounds in $\ell$-adic cohomology, both before and after the middle cohomological degree.

Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur—the Mediated Subjection View. On this view, legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations occurs when past generations seek to guide the future’s behavior, and legal officials in the future deem the norms and legal frameworks inherited from the past as reason-giving and action-guiding, and have the effective power to enforce them. Under these circumstances, we argue, future legal officials act as intermediaries of the past, enabling past generations to subject later ones to their laws. We first inspect the normative significance of subjection and introduce and motivate the Mediated Subjection View. We next scrutinize four objections to the possibility of legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations and show how our view can answer them.

We study locally flat disks in $(\mathbb {C}P^2)^\circ :=({\mathbb {C}} P^2)\setminus \mathring {B}^4$ with boundary a fixed knot $K$ and whose complement has fundamental group $\mathbb {Z}$. We show that, up to topological isotopy relative to the (rel.) boundary, such disks necessarily arise by performing a positive crossing change on $K$ to an Alexander polynomial one knot and capping off with a $\mathbb {Z}$-disk in $D^4.$ Such a crossing change determines a loop in $S^3 \setminus K$ and we prove that the homology class of its lift to the infinite cyclic cover leads to a complete invariant of the disk. We prove that this determines a bijection between the set of rel. boundary topological isotopy classes of $\mathbb {Z}$-disks with boundary $K$ and a quotient of the set of unitary units of the ring $\mathbb {Z}[t^{\pm 1}]/(\Delta _K)$. Number-theoretic considerations allow us to deduce that a knot $K \subset S^3$ with quadratic Alexander polynomial bounds $0,1,2,4$, or infinitely many $\mathbb {Z}$-disks in $(\mathbb {C}P^2)^\circ$. This leads to the first examples of knots bounding infinitely many topologically distinct disks whose exteriors have the same fundamental group and equivariant intersection form. Finally, we give several examples where these disks are realized smoothly.

A 1627 painting by the Spanish artist Juan Van der Hamen y León (1596–1631), known today as “Offering to Flora,” contains an overlooked visual joke. In its foreground, a depiction of a heliotropic sunflower appears in close proximity to a representation of iridescent shot fabric. Both were known in the period as tornasol, and both were associated variously with constancy and change. This article argues that by juxtaposing these homonyms, Van der Hamen’s painting prompted aristocratic viewers in Madrid to contemplate contradictory behavioral strategies for securing favor at court that were forged by debates about the values of mutability itself.

Institutional actors should aim to increase the long-term market value of their firms. This claim implies that firms should adopt a profit-maximizing mission. Business ethicists have been too quick to dismiss moral defenses of profit maximization. Even though there are limits to the moral benefits of profit maximization, a profit-maximizing approach is still morally better than alternative approaches to defining an institutional mission.