eScholarship PLUS

By Catherine Mitchell, Director, Access & Publishing

The California Digital Library is pleased to announce a new print-on-demand (POD) and ebook distribution/sales service for books and journals published in eScholarship, the University of California’s open access (OA) publishing platform. This service will enable publishing units within UC to develop hybrid OA business models for their publications. Books and journals enrolled in this service will be freely accessible via eScholarship while simultaneously offered for sale in POD and ebook formats via self-branded ecommerce storefronts and through retail affiliates such as Amazon.com.

In order to support this new publishing model, eScholarship has contracted with Lulu to provide a POD/ebook publishing and ecommerce platform. Working with the Lulu-powered platform will offer many significant advantages to publishing units. The intuitive online interface makes it easy to upload publications, manage descriptive information, and check the status of a publication—or to provide permission for authors to do so. Publishing units will have real-time access to sales and royalty information. Publications will be cross-linked between the two platforms, increasing discoverability and providing readers with multiple mechanisms for accessing the material. And the ecommerce storefront will be co-branded with the publishing unit/name and logo and the eScholarship/University of California logo, highlighting the high academic quality of the research being published.

This program’s goals are to empower publishing units to:

• Publish in multiple formats, with multiple business models
• Focus on scholarly publishing rather than on distribution, e-commerce, and web platform development
• Maintain full control over the publishing program and process
• Access real-time sales and analytics

For more information, read our FAQ (http://escholarship.org/publish_plus_pod.html)

Want to get started? Contact us today!