Calfornia Digital Library's eScholarship Repository Reaches Major Milestone


The California Digital Library announced today (Wednesday, March 12) that its groundbreaking eScholarship Repository has reached several major milestones. The eScholarship Repository offers University of California faculty a central online location for depositing working papers, technical reports, research results, datasets with commentary and peer-reviewed series. It is free for scholars to upload papers and free to users to download them.

Launched in April 2002, the eScholarship Repository recently reached 1,200 papers. Users have logged 60,000 full-text downloads of repository scholarship. Nearly 100 UC institutes, departments, research units and centers from nine UC campuses have joined the repository. The milestones demonstrate the repository's role as a scholarly publishing and research hub as well as its growing importance in the academic community.

The eScholarship Repository is at the vanguard of a movement to disseminate scholarly materials at low or no cost over the Internet. The repository serves as a model for other universities, libraries and institutions around the world. It also supports peer-reviewed series, which offer scholars an alternative to for-profit journals.

"We are pleased that so many faculty are signing on to join and that so many researchers are flocking to the repository to view the research located there," said Catherine H. Candee, director for scholarly communication initiatives for the California Digital Library. "The fact that over 95 percent of full-text downloads are coming from outside the University of California indicates that there is a hunger for this form of distribution.

"It also shows that the repository is enabling UC scholars to get their research disseminated widely both within and outside of the university. Materials are being shared between author and reader in entirely new ways."

The breadth of the scholarly content in the eScholarship Repository has grown rapidly. An exceptionally wide range of subjects can be found in the repository, including social science, business, education, humanities, and the sciences.

The Anderson School of Management at UCLA, Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, University of California Energy Institute (a multi-campus research unit), economics department at UC Santa Barbara, Center for Conservation Biology at UC Riverside, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are just a few of the UC academic departments and research units with repository sites.

There are many benefits for faculty who participate in the eScholarship Repository. Faculty can expect to have increased exposure and use of their scholarly materials. They can also submit associated content, such as images, spreadsheets, datasets, or PowerPoint presentations, along with their papers. Each participating research unit and academic department has its own site within the eScholarship Repository. The group decides what goes into their repository site and is responsible for maintaining it.

"I am delighted to have had the Institute for Social Science Research be one of the first research units at UCLA to join the eScholarship Repository," said David O. Sears, the director of the institute and a professor of psychology and political science. "Participating in the repository has increased our visibility and contributed to the exchange of research in the social sciences. I am especially grateful for the archival benefits. Because the scholarly materials we contribute will be maintained by the CDL for the long-term future, we can better support our faculty affiliates."

System administrators at institutes and departments benefit from the repository's streamlined submission, processing and posting tools, which were created by the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). New technology allows readers to discover and view relevant research by topic, author or sponsoring unit. Users can sign up for a service alerting them to new content, tailored to their interests. The repository's compliance with the Open Archives Initiative allows content to be more easily discovered on the Internet.

"The eScholarship Repository has reduced the cost and increased the reach of our publications," said Stanton A. Glantz, a UC San Francisco professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. "It provides an important addition to traditional journal publishing."

By providing a university-supplied infrastructure, faculty are able to deposit their materials within UC instead of paying for high-priced commercial alternatives. As the repository continues to grow, increasing numbers of scholars will find it to be an indispensable resource for research and teaching, which showcases UC research to an even wider audience.

The eScholarship Repository is a project of the California Digital Library's eScholarship program, which was launched to facilitate innovations and support experiments in the production and dissemination of scholarship.

The California Digital Library, which partners with the 10 UC campuses in a continuing commitment to apply innovative technology to managing scholarly information, opened to the public in January 1999. Organizationally housed at the UC Office of the President in Oakland, CA, the CDL provides a centralized framework to efficiently share materials held by UC, to provide greater and easier access to digital content, and to join with researchers in developing new tools and innovations for scholarly communication.



Editors: For additional information, please contact Suzanne Samuel at the CDL, (510) 587-6132 or escholarship@ucop.edu.