University of Tennessee Libraries Archive and Showcase Your Work in TRACE background

Archive and Showcase Your Work in TRACE

August 7, 2026

TRACE (Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange), UT Knoxville’s open access repository, preserves research, creative work, and administrative documents created by the campus community. Anyone can keep up with the world-class research at UT Knoxville by browsing TRACE!

Simple graphics: Open Access; Impact; Self-Archiving; New Platform

Open Access. Archiving your research in TRACE makes your work freely accessible for others to discover and explore.

Impact. Expand the reach and impact of your scholarship. Depositing your work in TRACE ensures that researchers around the globe can find it and cite it. 

Self-Archiving. Faculty, staff, and students self-archive their work in TRACE. [Submission of works produced by individual undergraduate students, however, must be sponsored by a faculty member, department, or program.]

New Platform. TRACE recently migrated to the DSpace platform, which supports a hierarchical structure of communities and collections. As an example, the community might be a college or other academic unit, and a subordinate collection might feature papers from a local conference or aggregate the work of a single faculty member.

Simple graphics: Permalinks; Researcher Profile; Metrics; Formats

Permalinks. Each item (article, presentation, graphic object, etc.) is assigned a “handle,” a persistent URL that can be used on CVs and personal websites. TRACE makes citations to your work as reliable as a scholarly journal while as accessible as any website.

Researcher Profile. Contributors can create a researcher profile and can link their work to their unique ORCID identifier.

Metrics. TRACE provides statistics on page views, downloads, and citations.

Formats. TRACE accepts multiple text, audio, video, and graphics formats.

Simple graphics: Put Your Preprint Here; Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Put Your Preprint Here. Authors may be able to deposit a version of their published journal articles. Caveat: Publishers set rules regarding which version of a paper may be archived — and when. Research Impact and Open Access librarians (impactopen@utk.edu) can help authors determine whether the publisher allows deposit of a preprint or postprint of the journal article — with or without embargo.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations. TRACE is also home to UT’s electronic theses and dissertations. However, rather than self-archiving, the submission process for ETDs is managed by the Graduate School.

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