NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Elise Proulx
(510) 587-6439
October 19, 2009
New Look, Enhanced Services for eScholarship UC’s open access
digital publishing service launches new site October 19
eScholarship
(www.escholarship.org) launches a redesigned website October
19, with a substantial array of digital publishing services for the
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 the
“Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we
see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access
publisher,” says
eScholarship’s relaunch coincides with the first
international Open Access Week (October 19 – 23), an event that marks the
growing trend toward providing unfettered access to academic research and
publications throughout the world.
eScholarship publication types
UC-affiliated scholars, editors, and research unit administrators
can publish the following original works in eScholarship:
· Journals
· Books
· Working Papers
· Conference Proceedings
· Seminar/Paper
Series
eScholarship also continues to provide deposit and dissemination
services for previously published articles or “postprints.”
New services, enhanced functionality
The relaunch
of eScholarship brings new opportunities for digital publishing to the
Books
published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined digital/print
publication service, courtesy of UC Publishing Services (UCPubS), 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 the implementation of:
· a highly
developed similar items finder
· visual
snippets of keywords within documents (KWIC Pics) accessible from the search
results page
· facets for
narrowing search results by UC campus, discipline, and peer review–
status
· keyword
search capability within documents
These new
services and tools all add up to a vastly enhanced experience for authors,
editors, and publishing program directors – and for the researchers who
seek out their work.
What can UC authors expect from publishing with eScholarship?
· Digital
publication of original scholarship
· Digital
dissemination of previously published materials
· Manuscript
and peer-review management systems
· Significant
reduction in time to publication
· Author
retention of copyright
· Clear
institutional affiliation and context
· Increased
citation rates*
· Perpetual
access and preservation services
· Full-text
search and display
· Comprehensive
usage data
· Free setup,
training, and publishing support
Who is using eScholarship?
Among its
many services, eScholarship supports the original publication of more than 20
peer-reviewed journals, including:
·
· Journal of Transnational American Studies (UC
· Nutrition Bytes (UCLA)
· Places (UC Berkeley)
·
· Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (UC Irvine)
“We
have used eScholarship to manage, edit, and publish the online journal San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science,”
says Dr. Samuel N. Luoma, SFEWS Editorin-Chief.
“As a source of peer-reviewed, credible, and objective information, SFEWS is recognized by all stakeholders as
playing an important role in understanding
eScholarship also
provides access to publications from nearly 250 research units and publishing
programs across UC, including:
· Center for
Conservation Biology (UC Riverside)
· Center for
the Study of Democracy (UC Irvine)
· Center for
Tobacco Control Research and Education (UCSF)
·
· International
and Area Studies Publications (UC Berkeley)
·
· Scripps
Institution of Oceanography (UC
·
“eScholarship
is central to our publishing mission, offering a level of access,
discoverability, and online permanence that traditional publishers cannot
match,” says Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director, International and
Area Studies Publications, UC Berkeley. “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.”
About eScholarship
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 7 years, now often exceeding
170,000 full-text downloads per month.
eScholarship
is a project of the Publishing Group of the California Digital Library and a
showcase for the group’s open source search and display technology
development. eScholarship’s publication submission system was originally
developed and is still maintained by the Berkeley Electronic Press.
*http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=560&Itemid
=391