Web site boosts publishing tools

UC’s open access digital publishing service recently launched a new Web site that promises more publishing options and services for faculty and researchers.

Now called eScholarship, the site at www.escholarship.org was formerly known as UC’s eScholarship Repository.

According to a news release, the revamped eScholarship site offers a “robust scholarly publishing platform” that enables UC departments, research units, publishing programs and scholars to have “direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.”

Catherine Mitchell, director of the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, said, “Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher.”

Mitchell stated that a significant need exists across UC campuses for an improved way 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,” she said.

The debut of eScholarship coincides with the first international Open Access Week (Oct. 19–23), an event that marks the growing trend toward providing unfettered access to academic research and publications throughout the world.

More infomation: www.escholarship.org.

Remembering Loma Prieta

On the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, UC researchers continue to learn from the tragedy and work on ways to make California more quake resistant. The UC Office of the President recently posted a package of Loma Prieta earthquake stories and videos that highlight UC research and other issues connected to the Oct. 17, 1989 event.

“Each earthquake tells us a story,” said I.M. Idriss, a professor emeritus of geotechnical engineering at UC Davis. “Sometimes it’s confirming something we know or sometimes it tells us something we didn’t know.”

Idriss, along with UC Berkeley professors Joseph Penzien and (the late) Alexander Scordelis and other government and academic researchers, served on the Governor’s Board of Inquiry, appointed by George Deukmejian in the weeks following the temblor. The governor charged the board with finding out why the bridge and freeway structures failed and how the state could keep it from happening again.

Read the full story at universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/22078.

State furloughs ‘poorly designed’

Much of the savings from California state workers’ three-day-a-month mandatory furlough will be offset by reduced revenue and increased costs to the state general fund in future years, according to a Oct. 15 study by the UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.

The report analyzes the impact of furloughing state employees for three days a month, or the equivalent loss of seven weeks of pay, compared to requiring a single monthly mandatory furlough day.

The furloughs, which amount to nearly a 14 percent pay cut for 193,000 state workers, are supposed to save the state $1.3 billion this fiscal year.

But the study found that the expanded furloughs will save the general fund only 12 cents for every dollar cut in wages and benefits.

“It is poorly designed, if the goal is to provide savings to the general fund,” said study lead author Ken Jacobs, also chair of the Labor Center.

Based on the data, Jacobs added, the state should consider reducing furloughs to one day each month and making up the difference in savings in the short term by raising revenues.

Read the report at www.berkeley.edu/news; click on “California furloughs will save less than anticipated.”

New UC Health Web site launched

A new Web site, UC Health, aims to provide Cali-fornians with a wide range of health care information.

Visit it at universityofcalifornia.edu/sites/uchealth.

The site notes that UC runs the country’s largest health sciences training program with more than 14,000 students, 16 health professional schools, five academic medical centers and 10 hospitals.

E-mail questions or suggestions to Alec Rosenberg, UC Office of the President coordinator of health science communications, at alec.rosenberg@ucop.edu.

— Dateline staff