TRACE Institutional Repository

Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange (TRACE) is the University of Tennessee’s open access repository, a publicly accessible archive featuring research, creative work, and administrative documents by members of the UT community. Any member of the UT community can upload material to TRACE. 

Created and maintained by the UT Libraries, TRACE gives UT Knoxville researchers a legal means to make their work openly available to the public, in keeping with the terms of their publication agreements. TRACE is more than just academic journal articles. TRACE also includes technical reports, data sets, theses and dissertations, administrative materials, conference papers and presentations, book chapters, creative works, archived Open Access VOL Journals hosted by UT Libraries, and other scholarship by members across the Volunteer community.  

TRACE supports a hierarchical structure composed of communities and collections. Communities include colleges, departments (administrative and academic), research centers, institutes, or other entities. Communities contain collections and sub-collections and collections hold the digital submissions. TRACE now runs on the well-known, open-source DSpace platform. TRACE is listed in OpenDOAR and in the DuraSpace Registry by Lyrasis. 

For more information on open archiving, please visit the TRACE User Support page. For questions about TRACE, email TRACE@utk.edu

• Depositing your work in TRACE ensures that global researchers can find it (in Google Scholar, for example) and cite it.  
• Items in TRACE are indexed by Google Scholar, Unpaywall, BASE, and all search engines, in addition to the library catalog. 
• Libraries traditionally collect, organize, preserve, and provide access to information resources. Standards and practices for these services now encompass digital collections, assuring the stability of a work's online location. TRACE makes citations to your work as reliable as a scholarly journal, while as accessible as any website. 
• TRACE provides a permanent link to the item ("handle") that can be used on CVs and personal websites and is a reliable link for others to cite. 
• TRACE supports a variety of file formats. We encourage you to deposit not just the finished work but related materials (including images, audio and video files, etc.) and versions that give context to that work and promote further scholarship. The library resolves backups, compatibility, and format issues and most file formats are supported.  
• TRACE provides download statistics for each item. 
• TRACE places you in the larger context of the UT environment, side-by-side with the scholarly and artistic contributions of your colleagues and students. Similar services at other universities and among scholarly societies link your work to the global community. 
• TRACE claims no exclusive rights to materials submitted, so items can be posted on other platforms as well as on TRACE.  
• Staff can be contacted at trace@utk.edu for questions, issues, starting new collections, or contributing student works. 

The Graduate School requires all graduate students to deposit their thesis or dissertation to TRACE (Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange), UT’s open access repository, which is administered by the UT Libraries. The Graduate School is responsible for creating and implementing policies related to the deposit and embargo of theses and dissertations to TRACE; therefore, most graduate students’ questions are best addressed by the Graduate School. Students should consult the Graduate School’s Theses & Dissertations page for the most current policies and recommendations.

Students should consult the Graduate School’s Theses & Dissertations page for the most current policies and recommendations.

As a secondary resource, consult the Libraries’ Graduate Student Publishing Support page for information on:

• Copyright questions
• Duplicate publishing concerns
• Defining embargoes