Can I scan paper articles as PDFs and post them in eScholarship?

Modified on Wed, 04 Oct 2017 at 02:05 PM

Yes, you can do so, but please be aware that the results generally will not work as well for searching, nor are they as likely to meet accessibility standards. In order of preference:

  •  You can scan the document as an image, with OCR (optical character recognition), and verify that the OCR is accurate (strongly preferred). 
  • If you are unable to generate OCR or if you are uploading legacy documents that were previously scanned, eScholarship will detect the need for OCR and generate that data. 
  • OCR cannot be created for some documents, such as scans of handwritten papers or documents that are primarily images. These publications will still be displayed in eScholarship, but their underlying text will not be searchable or available to screen readers.


All features of the eScholarship website have been designed to meet AA WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. However, accessibility of contributor content varies. Users can contact eScholarship Support to report accessibility issues. We reserve the right to remove images that don’t meet accessibility guidelines.