Subject: [CODE4LIB] eScholarship: University of California's open access digital publishing service launches new site October 19th

From: Lisa Schiff <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:54:41 -0700

Below is a press release regarding the redesigned and enhanced
eScholarship from the University of California.  The eScholarship front
end is built on the California Digital Library's own eXtensible Text
Framework (XTF), while the publishing workflows continue to be provided
by our vender The Berkeley Electronic Press through their Digital
Commons and EdiKit(r) technologies. 

Some highlights of the technological innovations that were developed to
support the new platform include:

KWIC Pics
Keyword in Context Pictures (KWIC Pics) is a display technology that
provides visual clues to aid in information searches. After a user of
the eScholarship site performs a search, a results page is displayed. By
hovering the cursor over matching keywords on the results page, the user
can view an excerpted image of the actual PDF article page containing
the keywords - providing an early glimpse of the document.  From a
technical perspective, hovering the cursor over a highlighted keyword
activates a series of events that are largely invisible to the user:

1.	JavaScript code running in the user's browser sends an AJAX
request to the eScholarship server, calling out the particular PDF file,
page number, and matching keywords to show. 
2.	The server then renders just that part of the PDF file and
returns it as an image. First it must interpret the PDF file, find the
right page, and turn it into image data (or "pixels"). PDF files are
highly variable and eccentric, so eScholarship relies on a robust and
well-tested PDF library called Poppler, which is also used within many
PDF image display tools for Linux. 
3.	The eScholarship server then modifies blocks of pixels to add
yellow background and red foreground highlighting to the matching
keywords, using text coordinates stored in the XTF full-text index. 
4.	Next the pixel data is compressed for quick transfer. If a small
number of colors or only shades of gray are present, PNG compression is
chosen; for full color images, JPEG compression is used instead. This
choice logic ensures accurate color reproduction while reducing
bandwidth (and thus time) as much as possible. 
5.	Finally the compressed image is sent back to the user's browser,
where the Javascript code displays it over the search results page. 

Rendering PDFs as Images
A very similar process occurs in eScholarship when displaying the full
view of an article. The page is initially filled with blank images.
JavaScript code monitors the scrollbar to find out which portion of the
page is visible in the browser window. It then issues AJAX requests to
render just those pages and displays them when they arrive from the
server. This allows us to display the PDF document within the larger
frame of the site.

Harvesting System
The harvesting system locates and copies each item and its metadata from
the publishing backend.  It then extracts text from the original PDF
file in order to support keyword searching, then classifies the item
according with on or more disciplines from an "Academic Disciplines"
taxonomy, and then indexes the text.

Please read the release below for more information about eScholarship.

NEWS RELEASE 

Contact: Elise Proulx 

(510) 587-6439 

[email-masked] 

October 19, 2009 

Oakland, CA 

New Look, Enhanced Services for eScholarship UC's open access digital
publishing service launches new site October 19 

eScholarship (www.escholarship.org) launches a redesigned website
October 19, with a substantial array of digital publishing services for
the University of California scholarly community and a dynamic research
platform for scholars worldwide.  

Previously known as UC's eScholarship Repository, the new eScholarship
offers a robust scholarly publishing platform that enables departments,
research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated
with the University of California to have direct control over the
creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship. 

"Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in
recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher,"
says Catherine Mitchell, Director of the Publishing Group at the
California Digital Library. "There is significant need across the
University of California campuses for a sustainable infrastructure to
support the publication and dissemination of research. In our efforts to
respond to this need, we have watched our institutional repository
evolve into a dynamic platform for the original publication of scholarly
work." 

eScholarship's relaunch coincides with the first international Open
Access Week (October 19 - 23), an event that marks the growing trend
toward providing unfettered access to academic research and publications
throughout the world. 

eScholarship publication types 

UC-affiliated scholars, editors, and research unit administrators can
publish the following original works in eScholarship:  

*     Journals 

*     Books 

*     Working Papers 

*     Conference Proceedings 

*     Seminar/Paper Series  

eScholarship also continues to provide deposit and dissemination
services for previously published articles or "postprints." 

New services, enhanced functionality 

The relaunch of eScholarship brings new opportunities for digital
publishing to the University of California and offers substantially
improved services for previously supported publication types.  

Books published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined
digital/print publication service, courtesy of UC Publishing Services
(UCPubS), a joint program of UC Press and the California Digital
Library. In addition, eScholarship now offers conference lifecycle
support, including mechanisms for proposal submission, program display,
and the ultimate publication of proceedings. 

 Much of the site redesign has been focused on improving the quality of
access to eScholarship publications. The site is optimized for Google
searches; PDFs can be viewed in their entirety without download; and
research can be shared easily through third party social networking
sites and RSS feeds. 

Likewise, the ability to locate relevant scholarship within the new site
is greatly improved as a result of the implementation of: 

*     a highly developed similar items finder 

*     visual snippets of keywords within documents (KWIC Pics)
accessible from the search results page 

*     facets for narrowing search results by UC campus, discipline, and
peer review- status 

*     keyword search capability within documents 

These new services and tools all add up to a vastly enhanced experience
for authors, editors, and publishing program directors - and for the
researchers who seek out their work. 

What can UC authors expect from publishing with eScholarship? 

*     Digital publication of original scholarship  

*     Digital dissemination of previously published materials  

*     Manuscript and peer-review management systems  

*     Significant reduction in time to publication  

*     Author retention of copyright 

*     Clear institutional affiliation and context  

*     Increased citation rates* 

*     Perpetual access and preservation services  

*     Full-text search and display  

*     Comprehensive usage data  

*     Free setup, training, and publishing support  

Who is using eScholarship? 

Among its many services, eScholarship supports the original publication
of more than 20 peer-reviewed journals, including: 

*     California Agriculture (UC Davis) 

*     Journal of Transnational American Studies (UC Santa Barbara) 

*     Nutrition Bytes (UCLA) 

*     Places (UC Berkeley) 

*     San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (UC Davis) 

*     Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (UC Irvine) 

"We have used eScholarship to manage, edit, and publish the online
journal San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science," says Dr. Samuel N.
Luoma, SFEWS Editor-in-Chief. "As a source of peer-reviewed, credible,
and objective information, SFEWS is recognized by all stakeholders as
playing an important role in understanding California's water issues. We
simply could not have succeeded in bringing this information to
scientists, the public, and policy makers without the open access and
high degree of professionalism provided by eScholarship. eScholarship is
a service of inestimable value to the UC scholarly community,
Californians in general, and the world." 

eScholarship also provides access to publications from nearly 250
research units and publishing programs across UC, including: 

*     Center for Conservation Biology (UC Riverside) 

*     Center for the Study of Democracy (UC Irvine) 

*     Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (UCSF) 

*     Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (UC Berkeley) 

*     International and Area Studies Publications (UC Berkeley) 

*     Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 

*     Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UC San Diego) 

*     Santa Cruz Center for International Economics (UC Santa Cruz) 

"eScholarship is central to our publishing mission, offering a level of
access, discoverability, and online permanence that traditional
publishers cannot match," says Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director,
International and Area Studies Publications, UC Berkeley. "Anyone,
anywhere in the world, with an Internet connection can read our books,
and that is particularly important for scholars in developing countries
where English-language books are difficult to come by." 

About eScholarship 

Initiated in 2002 as a collaborative development effort between the
Berkeley Electronic Press and the California Digital Library,
eScholarship now houses over 30,000 publications with more than 9
million downloads to date. eScholarship offers the UC academic community
a robust alternative to traditional scholarly publishing channels,
supporting the dissemination of UC research at all stages of the
scholarly lifecycle to all corners of the world. The rate of usage of
these materials has grown dramatically in the past 7 years, now often
exceeding 170,000 full-text downloads per month. 

eScholarship is a project of the Publishing Group of the California
Digital Library and a showcase for the group's open source search and
display technology development. eScholarship's publication submission
system was originally developed and is still maintained by the Berkeley
Electronic Press. 

*http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5
60&Itemid =391
<http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5
60&Itemid%20=391> 

-----------------------------------------------

Lisa Schiff, Ph.D.

Technical Lead

eScholarship Publishing Group

California Digital Library

300 Lakeside Drive #744
Kaiser Center
Oakland, CA 94612

510-987-0881 (t)

510-987-0243 (f)

www.escholarship.org

www.cdlib.org

[email-masked]