The Publishing group at the California Digital Library is pleased to announce the launch of a major redesign of the eScholarship repository and publishing platform. eScholarship serves as the Open Access repository for the University of California system, offering tools and services to help UC scholars and researchers openly share the full range of their scholarly work. eScholarship also provides a comprehensive Open Access publishing program, currently publishing over 70 academic journals across academic disciplines.
The eScholarship redesign represents a significant departure from previous technology approaches to the site: the development team has consciously moved away from custom builds and toward more widely adopted, open source technology solutions and strategies used frequently both inside and outside the academic library domain. Selected highlights include:
- A server built with Sinatra + Sequel
- Isomorphic JavaScript via node.js for server-side prerendering
- A "single-page" application built with React and various plugins
With this release, eScholarship now offers a robust consortial model: a single aggregated repository with custom access layers and a strong brand identity for each of our ten UC campus sub-repositories. The site is designed to meet the WCAG 2.0 AA standard for ADA accessibility, scales automatically for mobile and tablet devices, and features a flexible, modular design throughout the site that allows for multiple content display options and customizable landing pages through a lightweight, extensible and integrated CMS. Post-release, the team will turn its attention to creating a public API.
To learn more, visit the eScholarship redesign forum, read about the site's technical infrastructure at our Help Center, look at our code repository, see our feature list, or sign up for project updates.
It is our hope that this new model will be of interest to the community. Please visit the new eScholarship site and feel free to be in touch with any questions and feedback that you may have.