Now there’s an alternative for faculty members who say their campuses can’t afford skyrocketing prices for scholarly journals.

The University of California is expanding its eScholarship Repository to include peer-reviewed journals online, giving faculty a less expensive way to publish their research and provide scholars worldwide with free access to their findings.

The move came in response to complaints last fall by faculty that rising subscription costs were burdensome in light of budget cuts.

UC Santa Cruz faculty endorsed a proposal from associate professor of sociology Ben Crow to boycott the Dutch publisher Elsevier unless the company negotiated a reasonable subscription rate for its online journals.

"The eScholarship Repository opens new publishing opportunities — the publication process is cheap, and we can get working papers out more quickly than we would with hard copy," Crow said. "Plus, we get clear feedback about how often the papers are viewed. We have 20 downloads or more per month for many of our papers, which makes it worthwhile."

Crow expects the growth of online, peer-reviewed journals on the California Digital Library will gradually enable the university to stop subscribing to some journals.

"It will, of course, take some time before we see big benefits from this trend," he said.

As UC faculty and others have spoken out against the high cost of many scholarly journals, the eScholarship Repository has seen its numbers grow to nearly 2,600 papers and more than 400,000 downloads since its inception in 2002.

The first peer-reviewed journal in the eScholarship Repository is San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, published by the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis.

Other peer-reviewed materials include papers and edited volumes from the UC International and Area Studies Digital Collection.

The California Digital Library expects the number of peer-reviewed papers and journals to grow substantially in coming months.

Planned additions include InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, and Comitatus, a 34-year-old journal sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.