Faculty and students who publish their scholarly work online in Trace, the University of Tennessee’s digital repository, are getting a lot of attention. A million hits in the past year, as a matter of fact!

Downloads from Trace surpassed the two million mark this month, just a little over a year after crossing the one-million-download threshold.

Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange launched in 2009 as an open access platform for electronic publishing and preservation. Trace brings together in one place the work produced by the UT community and gives faculty a place to share their published and unpublished work. Faculty, students and departments can upload work in virtually any format — from datasets to dissertations — and assign keywords that make their scholarship easily discoverable by internet search engines. Trace reports to authors how often their individual works are accessed.

The open access platform increases the reach and impact of UT research. “The impact of Trace extends to student scholarship as well,” according to Holly Mercer, associate dean for scholarly communication and research services at the UT Libraries. Currently, the Top Ten Downloads highlighted on Trace include items contributed by students from the colleges of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources; Communication and Information; Education, Health, and Human Sciences; and Engineering, as well as students in the College Scholars and Honors programs. “The impressive number of downloads of student papers is a testament to the high caliber of UT students. But, certainly, our students’ work would not receive that level of readership were it not online and open-access,” Mercer said.

Trace also functions as a permanent repository that preserves the work of UT scholars and researchers. Additional features of the platform facilitate the publishing of electronic journals and the hosting of conferences.

Trace is sponsored by the UT Office of the Provost, the Office of Research, the University Libraries, and the UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Science Alliance. Trace operates through the Digital Commons service developed and hosted by Berkeley Electronic Press.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Seth Jordan, Trace Administrator and Digital Production and Publishing Manager, University of Tennessee Libraries, sjordan@utk.edu, 974-4121

Holly Mercer, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Research Services, University of Tennessee Libraries, hollymercer@utk.edu, 974-6600