eScholarship Plus: Publishing your eScholarship Research

The California Digital Library (CDL) introduces eScholarship Plus (http://escholarship.org/about_news_eScholarship_PLUS.html), a new print-on-demand (POD) and ebook distribution service for books and journals published in eScholarship, the University of California's open access publishing platform. This new service enables publishing units within UC to develop a hybrid publishing model for their publications. The electronic books and journals enrolled in this service are freely accessible via eScholarship, and are also available as POD and ebook formats for sale through ecommerce websites, including Barnes & Noble (bn.com) and Amazon.com. eScholarship has contracted with epublisher Lulu to create this hybrid model for ecommerce of POD/ebook publishing.

The California Digital Library sees the new program and the partnership with Lulu as an excellent opportunity to deliver content through various formats that allow readers to choose between online viewing, ebook, and print options. Readers will be able to access research publications via eScholarship's Open Access publishing platform, enabling authors and editors to develop the kinds of publications for hybrid publishing programs that can build towards a sustainable future.

eScholarship provides an easy-to-use interface for authors to upload their publications, manage the descriptive information for books and journals, check the status of the publications, and access their sales details and royalty information. Materials are linked from eScholarship and Lulu to increase their visibility, discoverability, and provide readers with multiple methods for accessing the publications. The publication webpages will be branded with the publishing unit name and logo, as well as the UC eScholarship logo, to highlight the high academic quality of the published research.

The process of setting up a new publication starts with contacting eScholarship, who will help create the publishing unit website and provide publishing support to get the research ready to share. The goal is to help small publishing units, departments, or individual faculty have influence with an ebook distributor. Books loaded to eScholarship Plus will be printed within 2-3 working days through Lulu's network of printers across the United States and around the world. Publishing units can prepare their own materials or Lulu can provide a fee-based, pre-publication service for editing, design, and production of publications.