UC's digital publisher offers new services, improved features

UC's open access digital publisher and research platform, eScholarship, has launched a redesigned website that offers new opportunities for digital publishing and substantially improved services for previously supported publication types.

 

eScholarship enables UC authors to keep their copyright, reach more readers, publish when they want to and protect their work's future without paying any fees.

 

Initiated in 2002 as a collaborative development effort between the Berkeley Electronic Press and the California Digital Library, eScholarship now houses over 30,000 publications with more than 9 million downloads to date.

 

eScholarship offers the UC academic community a robust alternative to traditional scholarly publishing channels, supporting the dissemination of UC research at all stages of the scholarly lifecycle to all corners of the world. The rate of usage of these materials has grown dramatically in the past seven years, now often exceeding 170,000 full-text downloads per month.

 

Previously known as UC’s eScholarship Repository, the new eScholarship offers a robust scholarly publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs and individual scholars associated with UC to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.

 

“Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher,” said Catherine Mitchell, director of the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library. “There is significant need across the University of California campuses for a sustainable infrastructure to support the publication and dissemination of research. In our efforts to respond to this need, we have watched our institutional repository evolve into a dynamic platform for the original publication of scholarly work.”

UC-affiliated scholars, editors and research unit administrators can publish journals, books, working papers, conference proceedings and seminar/paper series. eScholarship also continues to provide deposit and dissemination services for previously published articles or “postprints.”

Books published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined digital/print publication service, courtesy of UC Publishing Services, a joint program of UC Press and the California Digital Library. In addition, eScholarship now offers conference lifecycle support, including mechanisms for proposal submission, program display and the ultimate publication of proceedings.

 

Much of the site redesign has been focused on improving the quality of access to eScholarship publications. The site is optimized for Google searches; PDFs can be viewed in their entirety without download; and research can be shared easily through third-party social networking sites and RSS feeds.

 

Likewise, the ability to locate relevant scholarship within the new site is greatly improved as a result of a number of improved search features, including a highly developed similar-items finder and the ability to narrow search results by UC campus, discipline and peer-reviewed status.

 

 

Currently, eScholarship supports the original publication of more than 20 peer-reviewed journals, including Nutrition Bytes (UCLA), California Agriculture (UC Davis), the Journal of Transnational American Studies (UC Santa Barbara), Places (UC Berkeley) and the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (UC Irvine).

 

Nearly 250 research units and publishing programs across UC have used eScholarship to provide access to their publications, including the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.

 

“We have used eScholarship to manage, edit and publish the online journal San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (SFEWS),” said Samuel N. Luoma, its editor-in-chief at UC Davis. “We simply could not have succeeded in bringing this information to scientists, the public and policy makers without the open access and high degree of professionalism provided by eScholarship. eScholarship is a service of inestimable value to the UC scholarly community, Californians in general and the world.”

 

Among the services it offers are digital publication of original scholarship, digital dissemination of previously published materials, manuscript and peer-review management systems, increased citation rates and free setup, training and publishing support.

 

“eScholarship is central to our publishing mission, offering a level of access, discoverability, and online permanence that traditional publishers cannot match,” said Nathan MacBrien, publications director of International and Area Studies Publications at  UC Berkeley, one of eScholarship's clients.

 

“Anyone, anywhere in the world, with an Internet connection can read our books, and that is particularly important for scholars in developing countries where English-language books are difficult to come by," MacBrien said.

 

To find out more, go here.