OAKLAND — University of California Press and the California Digital Library are pleased to announce the official launch of a collaborative publishing venture, UC Publishing Services (UCPubS). UCPubS offers a suite of open access digital and print publication services to University of California centers, institutes, and departments that produce scholarly books. By coordinating the publishing efforts of UC Press, the California Digital Library's eScholarship program and publishing partners throughout the UC system, UCPubS provides a sustainable publishing model that extends the university's capacity to disseminate its scholarship to the world.

Building on current publishing activities, UCPubS enables organizations such as the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley and the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA to focus on scholarship rather than on distribution, sales and web platform development. "Campus partners immediately recognize the benefits of this program as it solves so many of the logistical challenges they face as small publishers," said Laura Cerruti, director of digital content development at UC Press. These challenges include reaching a broader public by increasing print sales and gaining access to new market channels; streamlining peer review and manuscript production; reliable preservation of digital publications; and tracking usage and sales of publications. "The program seeks to enable greater visibility of UC-affiliated research while reducing duplication of effort and cost," Cerruti added.

With this shared resource model, campus publishing partners are responsible for selection of content, peer review, editing, design and composition. eScholarship provides open-access digital publishing, peer review and manuscript management tools and preservation. University of California Press handles printing (using print-on-demand technology), sales and distribution of print publications and online marketing for both print and digital publications.

"For the University Press and the library, it is a mutually beneficial partnership, enabling us to amplify our capacity to serve our institution in ways that neither one of us could do as effectively alone. Combining eScholarship's open access platform with UC Press' commercial distribution capacity brings two seemingly divergent models together as a flexible solution to monographic publishing needs at UC," said Catherine Mitchell, director of the publishing group at the California Digital Library.

UC Press and the CDL have embarked on this collaborative publishing venture in response to compelling research revealing the vibrant publishing activity across the UC campuses and the need for systemwide services to support such activity. "UCPubS gives us access to the considerable expertise, capacity and scale of both UC Press and the CDL, which allows our authors to reach a worldwide audience-both in print and online-that would be difficult for us
to reach on our own," said Nathan MacBrien, director of the Global, Area and International Archive.

Several partners already are using UCPubS services: the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP); the Earl Warren Institute of Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, UC Berkeley School of Law; the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley; Global, Area and International Archive (GAIA); Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA; Regional History Project at the University Library, UC Santa Cruz; and the UCLA Graduate Student Association.

Yet the program's benefits are greater than the sum of its parts. By placing valuable research in a UC context and a global conversation, UCPubS is an important piece in UC's broader effort to ensure a sustainable scholarly publishing system in support of its research and teaching enterprise.