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....
Update. Also see the brief note on this news in The Wired Campus, which is generating some interesting reader comments. (Thanks to George Porter.)
Update (1/23/08). Also see Anna Opalka's story in The California Aggie. Excerpt:
..."The CDL is delighted by the substantial deposit rate and traffic sustained by the eScholarship Repository thus far," said Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the eScholarship publishing group and manager of the California Digital Library.
Mitchell said 90 percent of the visitors to the repository are directed from Google.
"We believe publishing in open access both increases the visibility of UC's substantial research efforts and provides a service to those academic institution and policymakers who might not otherwise have access to these kinds of materials - either because of their own restricted library holdings or because of a lack of awareness of the work being done at UC," Mitchell said....
Mitchell also said the CDL hopes to expand its faculty base, especially in the humanities, which "have been historically underrepresented in institutional repositories." ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/14/2008 08:26:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
