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A key element in the personalisation of health and social care is the upfront allocation of a budget to disabled and older people which they can use to obtain the supports they require. The benefit of this arrangement in increasing user choice and control will not materialise unless recipients can either acquire or access the skills of brokerage needed to plan and arrange their supports. The independent support broker is one important response to this need. However, the role needs to match the intentions of personalisation and avoid the undesirable characteristics that many social care users associate with the term ‘professional’. This raises specific questions about the definition of the role and training requirements of brokers, and broader themes which are explored with reference to the findings from two recent projects undertaken by the National Development Team for Inclusion. The second of these projects was commissioned by Skills for Care London, and led to a set of proposals for the training and accreditation of support brokers.

The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the current issues about support planning within personal budgets (PBs) for disabled and older people.

The paper is based on data from a round of professional workshops in five local authorities, which represented the first stage of a research study about support planning. Focus group discussions were held with participants from voluntary sector organisations (VSOs), as well as social services participants, and the paper is based on a thematic analysis of those discussions.

While there was considerable agreement about the desired outcomes for personal budget users, and the ingredients of good support planning, some major concerns were voiced about current constraints. Budgetary cuts were felt to impinge negatively on support planning, and conflicts were identified for social services between the facilitation of PB users’ choices, and the need to keep budgets limited. Support planning was often being re‐colonised by social services, and VSOs felt that their own role was being curtailed. Some suggestions were made about equalising the power relationships between social services, VSOs and PB users themselves.

These workshops represent five local authority areas which volunteered to take part in research, building on existing good practices in support for PB users. The obstacles they identified are likely to be very general ones, and need to be addressed by strategic solutions at national and local level.

This paper aims to report on the findings of the second phase of the Behavioural strand of the EC‐funded PEER project (http://www.peerproject.eu/). The paper seeks to explore authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to authors' peer‐reviewed accepted manuscripts in open access repositories.

The research was undertaken using a mixed‐method approach, involving the distribution of a survey by the 12 participating publishers to their authors in selected journal titles and a participatory workshop with European researchers from selected disciplinary areas.

Researchers' attitudes towards versions of published journal articles made open access via open access repositories may vary depending on whether researchers report behaviours from the perspective of an author or a reader. The research found that disciplinary cultures, norms and traditions shape authors' self‐archiving behaviour and readers' use of those versions of journal articles held in repositories.

One of the limitations of the research is that it was impossible for the research team to gauge the representativeness of the survey compared to the actual disciplinary distribution of the population of EU researchers, as such population information is not available in an aggregated and consistent format.

The PEER Observatory is an unprecedented large‐scale collaboration between publishers, researchers and repositories to investigate the effects of self‐archiving at European level. The paper provides a disciplinary reading of the findings and augments the understanding of how disciplinary culture and norms shape authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to self‐archiving.

This study aims to explore stigma in payday borrowing by investigating how the stigma associated with using such a service may spill over and affect other people, entities and relationships beyond the user within a service ecosystem.

In-depth interviews exploring consumers’ lived experiences and stigma were combined with publicly available reports from key stakeholders within the payday loan (PDL) industry to create a qualitative, text-based data set. The transcripts and reports were then analysed following thematic protocols.

Analysis reveals that the stigma associated with using a stigmatised service spills over, affecting not only the borrower but other actors within the service ecosystem. The analysis uncovers three important interactions that spilled over between the actors within the stigmatised service ecosystem (SSE), which can be damaging, enabling or concealed.

This study introduces and explores the concept of “SSEs” and investigates the impact of stigma beyond the dyadic relationships between service providers and users to consider the actors within the wider ecosystem. The findings reframe existing understandings about stigma, as this study finds that stigmatised services can play both a positive (enabling) and a negative (damaging) role within an ecosystem, and this study uncovers the role of stigma concealments and how they can affect relationships and value co-creation among different actors.

This study provides evidence for more robust policies for addressing stigma in different SSEs by mapping the effects of stigma spillover and its effects on the borrower and other actors.

This study contributes to reframing marketing priorities by extending existing work on consumer stigma by showing how the stigma of a PDL may spill over and affect other actors within a service ecosystem. Significantly, the interactions between the actors may have positive as well as negative outcomes.