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eScholarship Submission Guide: Best Practices

By uploading your work to a non-profit academy-owned open access repository like eScholarship, you are putting in to practice the mission of the campus while communicating the value of the library as partners in research enterprise. As we disseminate our scholarship with a global readership, we stand by our faculty and fellow researchers, and adhere to the UC OA Policies, by modeling the importance of public access to the knowledge we create.

Your work and the record you create when you upload the work to eScholarship will be full-text searchable and sometimes, discovered separately. Think of the person who finds your work and what do they need to fully understand what they have discovered.

Add a Creative Commons license and citation information on the first slide of your presentation slides or article. If it is a presentation, provide the speaker notes. Add data as a supplemental file if you have it. Ask the Scholarly Communications Working Group if you have questions on how to get the most benefit for your submission!

Visability and Sustainability

Should I upload a PDF or PPT file?

Recommendations are to upload a PDF file of your poster or presentation for several reasons:

  • The PDF file format is more sustainable
  • PDF file format is more universally readable and does not require your reader to have Microsoft Office.

I want readers to see a preview thumbnail of my article or poster, what should I do?

If you would like your readers to see a preview of your poster or presentation PDF, then in the upload process, after choosing the Poster or Presentation series, tag the upload as an article that is unpublished.  This generates the thumbnail preview of the first page of the PDF.

  • The "unpublished" option is only available when depositing content in a research unit like one for the Library. Otherwise, anything uploaded as an article must be tagged as "published" or "accepted" with an included journal title. Posters/presentations can still be submitted, but only as non-textual content. The files can still be downloaded, but there's not preview.
  • Library personnel can use the non-text content option, but we recommend article-unpublished to generate that preview.

 

Have a question that we haven't addressed yet?  If so, email the ScholComm group and we will get back to you with the answer.

 

Metadata - Discoverability and Understanding

Complete and machine readable metadata is important for discoverability and understanding of the item once it is found.

What information should I include in the Abstract box in eScholarship?

  • For Posters or Presentations
    We suggest you include a short description of the poster/presentation along with information about when & where it was delivered as well as where the conference was held.

    We also suggest you create a suggested citation for your poster or presentation to make it easier for your readers to reference it.  You should have enough information in the abstract box for them to create it, but give them a head start.
     
  • For Articles
    Even though your article might have an abstract, we suggest that you copy and past that into the abstract box.  Information in the abstract box is much more discoverable than just in the text of the manuscript.

What?  Create a citation?

It makes it easier for your readers to reference and give proper attribution and many publishers require a certain citation format to note the final published version. We've included links below for tips on how to create a poster or presentation reference.

 

Choosing a Creative Commons License

If the material includes rights held by others, make sure to get permission to sublicense those rights under the CC license. If you do have permission to use these works, in your license language you can included a statement such as: This work is licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 unless otherwise noted.