Stevan,
I wanted to let you know that CDL has entered into a partnership with
bepress.com. I'm attaching the press release as I expect some questions
will reach you in the next few days.
bepress.com, started by Berkeley faculty frustrated with the constraints
and inequities in commercially dominated scholarly publishing, set out to
automate the peer review and publication process and they came up with some
impressive tools. As our work with eScholarship communities expanded, we
found a growing need for software to aid the authors, editors and reviewers
of peer reviewed products. bepress software has the potential to fill that
need and will be used for the next stage of the repository infrastructure
we were able to launch because of the ePrints software. ePrints lowered the
barriers for institutions wanting to provide repository services for their
faculty and researchers; we're using bepress tools to add peer review
functionality to our core infrastructure.
Thanks again for making ePrints available to eScholarship.
Catherine
_____________________________________
Catherine H. Candee
Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives
California Digital Library
University of California - Office of the President
415 20th St., 4th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612
510.987.0425
510.893.5212 (Fax)
Catherine.Candee_at_ucop.edu
______________________________________
PRESS RELEASE:
______________________________________
CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY AND BERKELEY ELECTRONIC PRESS
ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION INITIATIVES
The California Digital Library and Berkeley Electronic Press today
(Thursday, Oct. 4) announced a partnership to advance innovations in
scholarly communication.
Through the partnership, the California Digital Library (CDL) will make
a suite of electronic publishing tools from the Berkeley Electronic
Press (bepress) available to University of California researchers. The
tools enable rapid and low-cost creation, management and online
publication of electronic journals, discussion papers series and other
electronic forms of scholarship.
The partnership is an important development for the librarys
eScholarship program supporting scholar-led innovations in online
dissemination of research from the University of California and
beyond.
The eScholarship program (escholarship.cdlib.org) is actively
supporting new electronic publications and services for tobacco control
research, environmental science, international and area studies, and
dermatology research, among others. The newly forged partnership will
extend new capabilities to those and additional fields.
The bepress technology will allow, for example, multiple "eprint"
repositories [
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/eprints.html ]
in the social sciences to be created and integrated, thus
supporting the emergence of a primary source of information for
students and researchers in either a specific or a broad-based academic
discipline.
New models in scholarly communication
The California Digital Library and The Berkeley Electronic Press have
similar motivations and visions for improving scholarly communication.
Creative use of technology to quickly, efficiently, and cheaply
distribute research results is chief among them. Access to research
will be enhanced by rapid dissemination, by nearly unlimited additional
materials such as images, animations and original datasets, and by
automating much of the editing and peer review process.
A practical example of this shared vision is eNvironment, a new online
peer-reviewed journal in development for support by the CDL and enabled
by bepress software. Overseen by a multidisciplinary editorial board
from UCLA, eNviroment will provide cutting-edge research, supported by
integrated multimedia files, executable files and similar materials, on
environmental topics.
Creating alternatives to traditional publishing that overcome its
inefficiencies is another part of the shared vision. Researchers often
wait many months to have their work published, with delays at every
stage. Among the major sources of frustration are long lag times during
peer-review, revisions, and the wait for articles until an entire issue
of a journal is filled.
The Berkeley Electronic Press system reduces such bottlenecks and their
costs, while providing online tools for quality control and peer review
that are appropriate for various forms and stages of scholarship.
The California Digital Library established its eScholarship program to
support scholars ready to address these issues and experiment with
alternatives. "CDL is committed to the concept of scholar-led
innovations in the communication of research," says Catherine Candee,
director of CDLs Scholarly Communication Initiatives.
"Providing bepress editorial tools to our faculty partners and hosting
their content online is a great way to further this aim," she says.
"Now, a research institute at UCLA or a lab at UC Berkeley can use an
eScholarship hosted eprint server
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/eprintservers.html
or electronic journal to release their work. There is no reason these
new publications could not be extended to other members of their
disciplines, fostering broad-based change."
The Berkeley Electronic Press system is a comprehensive and easy-to-use
tool for scholarly publishing. University of California researchers
interested in establishing a new electronic journal, preprint (i.e.,
non-refereed) series or other form of scholarly communication will be
able to customize their products presentation, policies and
functionality.
For example, some researchers may wish to use The Authors & Reviewers
Bank, a component that allows editors to track scholars contributions
as writers and referees. Others might wish to employ the bepress
journal family concept, whereby multiple unique journals concentrating
on a single subject area share editorial boards and peer evaluation
mechanisms.
Like many of the features within the bepress system, these elements are
modular; as a result, each journal or preprint series will have its own
unique look and feel.
"We have created a range of tools that are ideally suited for this type
of partnership," says Robert Cooter, co-CEO of The Berkeley Electronic
Press. "The primary goal of our company is to place the publishing
power in the hands of the individual researcher. Our relationship with
the California Digital Library ensures that cutting-edge research will
be more readily available, with lower barriers of access. We are quite
pleased to have the insight of CDL and its member communities to help
shape our future efforts."
About The California Digital Library
The CDL, which partners with the 10 UC campuses in a continuing
commitment to apply innovative technology to managing scholarly
information, opened to the public in January 1999.
As a digital "co-library," complementing and partnering with the
physical libraries of the UC system, the CDL uses technology to
efficiently share materials held by UC, to provide greater and easier
access to digital content, and to join with researchers in developing
new tools and innovations for scholarly communication.
About The Berkeley Electronic Press
Three University of California, Berkeley, professors founded the
Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) in 1999. As scholarly authors and
editors themselves, they realized that scholarly publication was
plagued by difficulties. Characterized by slow time to market,
typesetting gaffes, an inequitable revenue split between contributor
and publisher, and exorbitant subscription rates, the scholarly journal
system was broken. bepress develops Internet-based software to address
these problems. In addition to licensing these tools, bepress publishes
its own slate of electronic journals.
# # #
Editors: For additional information on the CDL please contact John
Ober, CDL director for education & strategic innovation, (510)
987-04254; or John.Ober_at_ucop.edu. Additional information about the
California Digital Library
may be found at the CDL web site,
http://www.cdlib.org .
For more information about bepress please contact Greg Tananbaum, Vice
President, Marketin,g (510) 981-0910, or greg_at_bepress.com. Additional
information about bepress may be found at ww.bepress.com
California Digital Library
http://www.cdlib.org/
University of California, Office of the President
415 20th Street Oakland, CA 94612
Received on Fri Oct 05 2001 - 20:14:32 BST