UCI Academic and Research Units Join eScholarship

Nine UCI academic and research units have launched their participation in eScholarship, a program initiated by the California Digital Library to provide an alternative publishing platform to the traditional commercial journal model that has become increasingly expensive and restrictive in terms of access to information.

In a nutshell, this is how eScholarship works: At no charge to UC departments, centers, and research units, UC licenses a suite of electronic publishing tools that enables rapid and low-cost creation, management, and dissemination of journals, peer-reviewed series, working papers, discussion paper series, and other electronic forms of scholarship by UC researchers.  All resources hosted on the eScholarship site are freely available; there are no subscription or use fees.  Benefits to the publishing unit range from significant administrative time savings and cost savings, higher visibility, permanent storage and access, and no technology costs.  Authors retain the copyright for all content posted in the repository.  A full description of eScholarship policies and a guide to participation for UC units is available at repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/.

Two UCI academic departments and seven research units have contributed a variety of research materials to the site, including papers presented at seminars and colloquia, technical reports, and working papers.  In addition, an interdisciplinary group of UCI faculty will soon launch a new journal that will be published only in electronic form.  The participants to date:

• Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing
• Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations
• Center for Research on Latinos in a Global Society
• Center for the Study of Democracy
• Department of Economics
• Department of Mathematics
• Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
• Institute of Transportation Studies
• Thesaurus Linguae Graecae®

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Project, for example, has contributed papers written toward inclusion of many Greek characters in the ISO (International Standards Organization) standard and the Unicode character set for the Greek language.  Maria Pantelia, Professor of Classics and TLG Director, observes: “We were attracted by the visibility and reputation of the California Digital Library and expected that our papers would receive much more attention in eScholarship than if they were simply posted on our website.  Since we joined, the idea of such institutional repositories has really taken off in the scholarly world, and this type of distribution is gaining credence.  Our number of hits continues to increase, and it appears that our expectations are becoming reality.”

An up-to-date list of UCI participants, including descriptions of the nature of the materials they are contributing, is available at repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/uci.html.  The Libraries encourage other UCI units to consider the advantages that this cutting-edge service has to offer for disseminating research results to a worldwide audience quickly and conveniently.

For further information, please contact Lorelei Tanji, eScholarship liaison (x45216 or ltanji@uci.edu).