eScholarship

University of California system · Operated by the California Digital Library, Oakland, California · Ten UC campuses and affiliated research centers

Overview

eScholarship is the open access repository and scholarly publishing platform for the University of California — the system of ten public research universities that spans Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Irvine, Riverside, Merced, and San Francisco. It was launched in April 2002 by the California Digital Library (CDL), the co-library of the UC system, in collaboration with the UC campus libraries — born, as the CDL has written, "of consultations with scholars and librarians across the UC system" and designed from the start "to facilitate and support scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication." Two decades after its launch, eScholarship hosts more than 300,000 publications and has accumulated over 100 million item views, serving as the primary open access dissemination channel for UC research across all disciplines. It is operated without subscription fees, paywalls, or article processing charges for UC-affiliated researchers — a structural embodiment of the open access values that motivated its founding.

eScholarship operates two distinct but integrated programs: eScholarship Repository, which stores and provides access to working papers, preprints, theses, dissertations, and published articles deposited by UC researchers; and eScholarship Publishing, which provides comprehensive publication services for UC-affiliated journals, books, conference proceedings, and other scholarly works. Together these programs give the UC system a publishing and archival infrastructure that is institutionally owned, academically controlled, and permanently free for readers and authors — a combination that the CDL describes as giving it a "market-agnostic stance" that positions it to serve scholarly communication needs that commercial publishers and even most university presses cannot serve, including new voices, emerging fields, and disciplines without strong commercial markets.

Origins: The California Digital Library and the Open Access Moment

The California Digital Library was established in 1997 as the eleventh UC library — a system-wide digital library whose purpose was to assemble and enable creative use of the world's scholarship for the UC libraries and the communities they serve. In its early years it focused primarily on licensing digital content from commercial publishers for the UC system. The founding of eScholarship in 2002 represented a different and more ambitious aspiration: rather than merely purchasing access to others' publications, the CDL would build infrastructure that enabled the UC system to own and control its own scholarly output.

The eScholarship Repository launched on April 3, 2002, initially focused on humanities and social sciences working papers. Built under a co-development partnership with the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), it provided the UC community with a standard web-browser interface for submitting, finding, and using scholarly information — including version tracking that allowed readers to follow the evolution of a paper from working draft through publication. The initial participants included Berkeley's Olin Program in Law and Economics, the Institute of Industrial Relations, and the Institute of Business and Economic Research, moving existing working paper series onto the new platform. The University of California International and Area Studies (UCIAS) peer-reviewed ePublications Program was also an early partner. Over the following two decades, the platform expanded from a working paper repository into the comprehensive publishing and archival infrastructure it is today.

The CDL has described eScholarship as having "started the conversation about open access at UC" — preceding and making possible the UC system's subsequent comprehensive open access policies (the systemwide OA policy adopted in 2013 requires UC researchers to deposit their articles in an open access repository, with eScholarship as the primary designated destination), the UC's transformative agreements with major commercial publishers, and the CDL's signature of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information in 2025, committing to open, transparent, and community-governed research information systems.

Services

eScholarship Repository

The institutional repository for all ten UC campuses and affiliated research centers. Accepts working papers, preprints, published articles, book chapters, conference papers, and other scholarly outputs. Primary destination for articles deposited under UC's comprehensive open access policies. More than 100,000 UC-faculty/staff articles deposited under OA policies alone.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Repository for nearly 45,000 electronic theses and dissertations from the ten UC campuses — the complete scholarly output of UC graduate students, freely accessible without subscription. A major resource for research in all disciplines.

eScholarship Publishing — Journals

Comprehensive open access journal publishing for UC-affiliated departments, research units, and scholarly communities. Currently hosts 85 active open access journals. Emphasizes supporting new voices, emerging fields, and disciplines not well served by commercial markets. Journals flip from subscription to open access through the program.

eScholarship Publishing — Books and Monographs

Open access book and monograph publishing for UC-affiliated authors and departments. Provides publication services for edited volumes, conference proceedings, and other long-form scholarship alongside the journals program.

Research Unit and Department Collections

Dedicated collections for UC research units, institutes, and centers — providing stable, persistent open access archives for the output of specific research programs. From the UC system's environmental science centers to area studies institutes, hundreds of research units maintain collections on eScholarship.

CDL Collection on eScholarship

The California Digital Library's own publications and conference proceedings — including papers from the iPRES digital preservation conferences and CDL technical documentation — are available through the CDL's eScholarship collection, making the CDL's own research openly accessible through the same infrastructure it operates.

Scale and Impact

As of its 20th anniversary assessment in 2022 — the most recent comprehensive published figures — eScholarship hosted more than 300,000 publications, had accumulated over 100 million total item views, and was adding content continuously through both the OA policy deposit pipeline and new eScholarship Publishing journals. The 85 current active journals represent a diverse range of disciplines: established titles like San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (founded 2003) sit alongside newer publications in areas including digital humanities, ethnic studies, and undergraduate research. The explicit emphasis of the eScholarship Publishing program on supporting publications from "emerging fields, underrepresented voices, and disciplines not well served by a commercial marketplace" reflects a values-driven approach to scholarly publishing that prioritizes access and inclusion over market viability.

The UC open access policies — among the most comprehensive at any research university in the United States — have made eScholarship the mandated deposit destination for a large fraction of UC research output, ensuring that the platform's content grows continuously regardless of individual author choices. The CDL's transformative agreements with major commercial publishers (Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and others), negotiated through the University of California Libraries consortium, further expand the flow of UC-affiliated research into open access channels, with eScholarship serving as the permanent preservation and access infrastructure for that output.

Relationship to Open Access Advocacy

eScholarship's significance extends beyond its function as a repository and publishing platform: it has been a practical instrument of open access advocacy within the UC system and a demonstration model for what institutionally operated open access infrastructure can achieve. The CDL's description of it as "market-agnostic" — positioned to serve scholarly communication needs regardless of whether they have commercial value — distinguishes it from both commercial publishers and from the article processing charge (APC) model of open access that shifts cost from readers to authors and creates its own access inequalities. By providing publishing and repository services at no cost to UC authors, eScholarship embodies the original open access aspiration of removing barriers to both reading and publishing scholarly work.

The CDL's 2025 signature of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information — committing to open, transparent, and community-governed research information systems — extends this commitment to the metadata and infrastructure layer of scholarly communication, addressing the argument that open access publication is undermined if the systems used to discover, measure, and evaluate that research are themselves proprietary and commercially controlled.

Access and Usage

All content on eScholarship is freely accessible without registration or subscription at escholarship.org. The repository can be browsed by UC campus, department, journal, or subject area, and searched by keyword, author, and title. The journals list is at escholarship.org/journals. Information about depositing materials under the UC open access policies, or about publishing a journal or other scholarly work through eScholarship Publishing, is available at escholarship.org/aboutEschol. The California Digital Library's broader services and documentation are at cdlib.org