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Congratulations! If you’ve made it through Parts 1-4 of this toolkit, you’ve successfully shared some or all of your collected scholarly work online. The world can now benefit from the ability to read your work without hitting a paywall or needing to find a print copy. In this section, we briefly discuss a couple of bonus steps you may want to consider: working with your campus archives and creating a publication collection in eScholarship

Get help from your campus library

As we wrote in the introduction, some authors will be lucky enough to have resources from their academic departments that can help with a project like this, but most will need to undertake the work themselves. We also mention in a few places, however, that if you get stuck at certain points — like using Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory or tracking down a hard to find publication — that your campus library may be able to help. The library is a good resource to keep in mind for this project generally. They won’t be able to do this work for you, but if there’s something about a particular tool or publication that is giving you trouble, try contacting them for help. If you have questions about this guide itself, or suggestions for how to improve it, contact the UC Office of Scholarly Communication at osc@ucop.edu. Links for chat and email contact information for each campus library is below.

The University of California Libraries are also home to the institutional archives of the UC campuses. While you’re working to preserve your legacy by making your publications public, consider whether other records you have might contain valuable university history. The UC Archivists Council has prepared a guide, “UC Faculty Papers: Identification and Appraisal,” that explains the types of materials that university archives would be interested in collecting. If you have materials that you think fit the description of what the archives collect and you would like to donate them, contact your campus library. 

Share your collected works

Once your publications are posted to eScholarship, anyone in the world can read them. Most readers find publications in eScholarship the way people find most things online – through search engines.

If you also want to be able to point people to a list of all of your work in eScholarship, you have a couple options.

First, every publication in eScholarship has an “Author & Article Info” tab. If you click on your name in this tab, it will take you to a search results screen populated with your publications. The URL for that page will look something like https://escholarship.org/search/?q=author%3ALastname%2C%20Firstname. You can share this link, and it will take people to that list of search results.

Alternatively, you may be able to have your academic department set up a collection for you. Any UC academic department can request its own site in eScholarship, and many departments already have one. If your department has a site, or would like to create one, eScholarship can create a series within the department site that collects all your publications together, like this one. Your department needs to have a site administrator willing to maintain the site and move your publications into this series, or your department can grant you those administrator privileges.

If you have any questions about what’s possible in eScholarship, or just want to let us know about your experience using this guide, please let us know by sending us an email at osc@ucop.edu.  If you use this toolkit to put your own work online, we’d love to see the results so that we can collect examples to highlight here.

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