A core goal of the UC Publication Management System is simplifying how University of California authors make their scholarly articles open access in eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and publishing platform.
In 2021, we launched an auto-deposit tool to reduce the burden on authors to deposit work that they had already made open access in another location. The auto-deposit tool was created by the eScholarship Publishing team at the California Digital Library and is available open source in our GitHub repository.
- How the auto-deposit tool works
- How to learn what has been or will be auto-deposited
- Frequently Asked Questions
How the auto-deposit tool works
The auto-deposit tool leverages the European PubMed Central (EuroPMC) “pending PDF” feature in Symplectic Elements, the UC Publication Management System software, to complete a deposit of known open access PDFs that UC authors have already claimed and verified. Every Monday, the auto-deposit tool scans publications in your “claimed” list to find any with a “pending PDF” from EuroPMC and completes the deposit. You or your UC co-authors can later update the PDF as needed.
Criteria for auto-deposit
The auto-deposit tool searches for articles which:
- Have a PDF available to deposit from European PubMed Central
- Fall under the relevant UC open access policy (i.e. published after May 2012, for a UCSF academic senate faculty author)
- Have not been retracted or withdrawn at the time that the auto-deposit tool discovers the PDF
- Are not corrections, letters, and other types of articles which may require additional consideration before depositing
How to learn what has been or will be auto-deposited
The UCPMS sends a notification to your account any time it finds an open access PDF that you can safely deposit to eScholarship from two data sources: arXiv and EuroPMC.
Screenshot: The “Notifications” box in the UCPMS displays a message of “2 Publications with files available that you may be able to deposit to help meet your OA Policy”.
Clicking this link will display your claimed publications with the “File available at external source = Available” filter applied to your publication list.
Further filter the display to only show publications with the “Repository status = Deposited” filter:
Your claimed publications list will update to display only those which have a PDF available to deposit and which are already in eScholarship. Click the “Deposits” tab for an item to learn whether it was deposited using the auto-deposit tool. Auto-deposited PDFs have a filename beginning with “PMC”, following by its PubMed Central identifier:
Screenshot: The deposit tab for a publication displaying the filename “PMC6339212.pdf”.
I have several articles in PubMed Central. What’s the easiest way to auto-deposit them to eScholarship?
Authors with publications in PubMed Central can export their citations from PubMed (we recommend TeXMed), then import the list into the UCPMS. The next time the auto-deposit tool runs, it will deposit all PDFs that it finds, and it will continues to check EuroPMC for additional PDFs each week thereafter. Learn more about importing your publication lists to the UC Publication Management System.
I don’t like the PDF in the auto-deposit version. Can I replace the PDF?
Yes. The auto-deposit tool is designed to work like any other deposit using the UCPMS. To replace the PDF, log into the UCPMS, search for the article’s title in your publication list, click the "Deposits" tab, then "View" to start the redeposit process: 
If you would like to add a different Creative Commons reuse license to your article in eScholarship, please reach out to your campus library for assistance.
Why European PubMed Central and not PubMed Central?
Like PubMed Central, European PubMed Central is an open access repository of biomedical research works. It originally served as a mirror of PubMed Central and has since developed unique features that enable open access articles to be more easily discovered and shared across multiple systems. European PubMed Central offers an easy way to find open access PDFs available in its repository, and the UCPMS uses that system to provide those PDFs to authors to deposit to eScholarship. (A similar feature is available to provide open access PDFs from the preprint server arXiv.) In the future, the developer of the system (Symplectic) may expand this feature beyond European PubMed Central and arXiv.