Catherine Mitchell
Director, Publishing Group
California Digital Library, University of California
Institutional repositories (IRs) continue to be a hard sell to faculty in the absence of deposit mandates. Amidst the swirl of disciplinary repositories, concerns about tenure and promotion, and confusion about copyright, it remains difficult to make a compelling case for deposit into an IR as a necessary step in the lifecycle of scholarly communication. This presentation will focus on the California Digital Library’s current effort to stop talking about repositories altogether and to emphasize, instead, the innovative digital publishing services that eScholarship offers the University of California (UC) community as a platform for the original publication of new scholarly work. The presenter will discuss the work that has been done to identify the publishing infrastructure needs of UC, the drivers behind the recent redesign of eScholarship (launched October 19, 2009), the targeted outreach and marketing campaign to the campuses, and the exciting development of a shared services publishing program, launched with the University of California Press. This discussion will consider how the very notion of the “success” of an IR lies not in a quantifiable set of objects but rather in its ability to serve the specific research and publishing needs of its scholarly communities.
