Campus-based publishing partnerships: A guide to critical issues

Campus-based publishing partnerships offer the academy greater control over the intellectual products that it helps create. To fully realize this potential, such partnerships will need to evolve from informal working alliances to long-term, programmatic collaborations. SPARCâ s Campus-based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues addresses issues relevant to building sound and balanced partnerships, including: Establishing governance and administrative structures; Identifying funding models that accommodate the objectives of both libraries and presses; Defining a partnershipâ s objectives to align the missions of the library and the press; Determining what services to provide; and Demonstrating the value of the collaboration. SPARCâ s Campus-based Publishing Partnerships will help libraries, presses, and academic units to define effective partnerships capable of supporting innovative approaches to campus-based publishing.

Nutrition or Detoxification: Why Bats Visit Mineral Licks of the Amazonian Rainforest

Many animals in the tropics of Africa, Asia and South America regularly visit so-called salt or mineral licks to consume clay or drink clay-saturated water. Whether this behavior is used to supplement diets with locally limited nutrients or to buffer the effects of toxic secondary plant compounds remains unclear. In the Amazonian rainforest, pregnant and lactating bats are frequently observed and captured at mineral licks. We measured the nitrogen isotope ratio in wing tissue of omnivorous short-tailed fruit bats, Carollia perspicillata, and in an obligate fruit-eating bat, Artibeus obscurus, captured at mineral licks and at control sites in the rainforest. Carollia perspicillata with a plant-dominated diet were more often captured at mineral licks than individuals with an insect-dominated diet, although insects were more mineral depleted than fruits. In contrast, nitrogen isotope ratios of A. obscurus did not differ between individuals captured at mineral lick versus control sites. We conclude that pregnant and lactating fruit-eating bats do not visit mineral licks principally for minerals, but instead to buffer the effects of secondary plant compounds that they ingest in large quantities during periods of high energy demand. These findings have potential implications for the role of mineral licks for mammals in general, including humans.

Services to support BU Authors with Open Access Issues

A working paper written for Boston University Libraries to foster discussion about how to provide better support for BU faculty authors.

Real-Time Databases: Issues and Applications (RTDB'96 Workshop Report)

This report summarizes the technical presentations and discussions that took place during RTDB'96: the First International Workshop on Real-Time Databases, which was held on March 7 and 8, 1996 in Newport Beach, California. The main goals of this project were to (1) review recent advances in real-time database systems research, (2) to promote interaction among real-time database researchers and practitioners, and (3) to evaluate the maturity and directions of real-time database technology.

Open Issues on TCP for Mobile Computing

We discuss the design principles of TCP within the context of heterogeneous wired/wireless networks and mobile networking. We identify three shortcomings in TCP's behavior: (i) the protocol's error detection mechanism, which does not distinguish different types of errors and thus does not suffice for heterogeneous wired/wireless environments, (ii) the error recovery, which is not responsive to the distinctive characteristics of wireless networks such as transient or burst errors due to handoffs and fading channels, and (iii) the protocol strategy, which does not control the tradeoff between performance measures such as goodput and energy consumption, and often entails a wasteful effort of retransmission and energy expenditure. We discuss a solution-framework based on selected research proposals and the associated evaluation criteria for the suggested modifications. We highlight an important angle that did not attract the required attention so far: the need for new performance metrics, appropriate for evaluating the impact of protocol strategies on battery-powered devices.