eScholarship: University of California's open access digital publishing service launches new site October 19th

["Lisa Schiff" <Lisa.Schiff@ucop.edu>]

NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Elise Proulx
(510) 587-6439
elise.proulx@ucop.edu
October 19, 2009
Oakland, CA

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 University of California scholarly community and 
a dynamic research platform for scholars worldwide.

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 University of California 
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," says 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."

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 University of California and offers 
substantially improved services for previously supported 
publication types.

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:

*     California Agriculture (UC Davis)
*     Journal of Transnational American Studies (UC Santa Barbara)
*     Nutrition Bytes (UCLA)
*     Places (UC Berkeley)
*     San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (UC Davis)
*     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 Editor-in-Chief. "As a source of 
peer-reviewed, credible, and objective information, SFEWS is 
recognized by all stakeholders as playing an important role in 
understanding California's water issues. 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."

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)
*     Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (UC Berkeley)
*     International and Area Studies Publications (UC Berkeley)
*     Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
*     Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UC San Diego)
*     Santa Cruz Center for International Economics (UC Santa Cruz)

"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.

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