The story
In 2002, bepress, then known as the Berkeley Electronic Press, partnered with the California Digital Library to create the eScholarship Repository This entailed "hiding" some of the more sophisticated features of the existing journal publishing system, while adding features such as compliance with the OAI-PMH harvesting protocol.
In June 2004, bepress officially launched its Digital Commons institutional repository software at the American Library Association annual conference.
From 2004 to July 2007, Digital Commons was licensed exclusively by ProQuest Information and Learning. As of July 2007, bepress resumed licensing Digital Commons directly to subscribers.
In August 2017, it was announced that Elsevier had acquired bepress, drawing criticism from customers and the wider library community.
From Wikipedia’s article on Digital Commons (Elsevier), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3