In 1999, UC Berkeley Professors Robert Cooter, Aaron Edlin, and Ben Hermalin banded together to launch a sustainable alternative to the exorbitant and clunky academic journal publishing: Berkeley Electronic Press, now simply called bepress.
Cooter, Edlin, and Hermalin began by developing an innovative online editorial management system specifically designed to make peer-review workflow as quick and easy as possible. Before long, they realized that the hosted, unlimited model bepress provided could help with a lot more than publishing journals.
Institutions were starting to identify the need ways to showcase the breadth of all the scholarship they produce: everything from faculty papers to student projects, annual reports, and community partnerships. And the bepress community was eager to stretch the limits of our core publishing platform. So, in 2001, we started developing different solutions to manage everything our customers were working with and launched our flagship repository platform, Digital Commons.
The content is all the institution’s own; bepress provides the platform, the support, and the expertise.
Over time, bepress developed other services for authors, editors, and researchers, including several specific to the legal field. These services included Lawkit for law review editors and ExpressO, which made law review submissions fast, easy and paper-free. After years of service to hundreds of law reviews and thousands of users, both services have been retired as of July 2021.
In designing SelectedWorks (now Expert Gallery Suite), a research announcement tool that maximizes the readership and impact of a scholar’s work, we combined our knowledge of scholarly publishing trends with faculty requests to create a comprehensive service. SelectedWorks/Expert Gallery Suite actively links communities and provides increased discoverability and impact metrics.
In 2011, bepress chose to exit the commercial subscription-based journal business in order to focus all of our energies on our open access services; this meant selling the 60+ bepress journals which we had published for the last decade. We believe the future of scholarly publishing lies in the hands of libraries and scholars to provide open access and effective research dissemination. That belief drives our work to provide authors and universities with solutions for them to showcase and share their research.
In 2017, bepress joined Elsevier, a leader in information and analytics for customers across the globe. By joining Elsevier, we are better able to address institutions’ promotional needs, such as attracting students, faculty and grants, and preserving research data and outputs. Elsevier’s suite of research products, such as Scopus, Pure, SSRN and SciVal enhance the breadth and quality of the reach, promotion and impact services we deliver to our customers.
All of the things we do come from who we are. We are a dedicated company with diverse employees, too many advanced degrees, and a shared love of academia. Our supportive work environment translates into creative thinking, good listening skills, and personalized customer service. And after years of service, our core mission has remained unchanged: to provide effective publishing and research dissemination services that keep control in the hands of scholars and libraries.
