University of California eScholarship® Repository Exceeds 5 Million Full-Text Downloads; 20,000 Papers

By Catherine Mitchell, CDL Acting Director of Publishing Services

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 over 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 5 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.