UC eScholarship Repository exceeds 5 million full-text downloads
OAKLAND --
The University of California announced this week that its widely used
eScholarship Repository has surpassed the 5 million mark for full-text
downloads of its open access scholarly content. This major milestone
reflects the impressive adoption and usage rate the repository has
enjoyed since its inception in 2002, with University of California
academic units and departments from its 10 campuses publishing or
depositing more than 20,000 papers and works.
The eScholarship Repository, a
service of the California Digital Library, provides a robust full-spectrum,
open access publishing platform for pre-prints, post-prints, peer-reviewed
articles, edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals. The repository houses a
broad range of scholarly content from disciplines across the humanities, social
sciences, mathematics and sciences.
The rate of usage of these materials
has grown exponentially in the past five years, now often exceeding 55,000 full-text
downloads per week.
As evidenced by this rate of
activity, the eScholarship Repository represents one of the University of California’s
most successful and sustained efforts to improve and provide innovative
alternatives to the troubled scholarly publishing system – a system that increasingly
struggles to serve the needs and requirements of the academic community.
“We’re very excited about the uptake
and use of the eScholarship Repository at the University of California,”
says Catherine Candee, executive director, strategic publishing and broadcast services
at UC’s Office of the President. “Our open access publishing platform
represents a critical component of UC’s broader effort to strengthen
university-based publishing services and integrate them into the research,
teaching and public service mission of the university.”
Part of a suite of innovative publishing
services developed by the CDL in recent years, the eScholarship Repository
serves the scholarly publishing needs of individual faculty and academic
departments, laboratories and research units across the University of California
system. It is also a central mechanism in the collaborative publishing efforts
between the CDL and the University
of California Press.
Note to editors: Additional information about the eScholarship Repository and the
California Digital Library may be found at http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship and http://escholarship.cdlib.org.