When you're looking at an academic platform like escholarship.org, the first thing to check is who runs it. The domain name itself gives it away: this is the University of California's open-access repository, a service that has been around since 2002. That kind of longevity is hard to fake. Unlike a fly-by-night operation, this site has a history you can trace through the Wayback Machine, and it shows up in Google's safe browsing results with no warnings.
What about the experience of actually using it? The site throws up a Cloudflare security page when you try to access it from a non-browser tool, which is normal for a platform that hosts scholarly content and wants to block scrapers. Once you're in, you'll find over 300,000 research papers and dissertations. The lack of a visible contact page is a minor annoyance, but not a safety concern — the institution behind it is well-known.
If you're a student or researcher looking for articles, escholarship.org is a trustworthy source. Just be aware that the site's security will block automated access, so if you're trying to scrape or crawl it, you'll need to go through the proper channels. For regular browsing, it's a legitimate, well-established resource.