Renovation projects impacting services at multiple library locations. More information.
Open access materials – including articles, books, and datasets – are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
On Wednesday, October 21, UK Libraries will celebrate International Open Access Week by shining a light on the many open access resources that help users find research data, make scholarship and research outputs available to global audiences, and reduce the cost of course materials for students.
To help us, Dr. Ray Smith, Professor of Plant & Soil Sciences, will present on the Proceedings of the International Grasslands Congress, the largest collection on UK’s open access institutional repository, UKnowledge.
Approaching one million downloads, with both international authorship and usage, this collection demonstrates Dr. Smith’s and UK Libraries’ commitment to open access for the common good of all.
The presentation will take place in the Young Library Auditorium at 2pm, and light refreshments will be offered in the Alumni Gallery immediately following.
UK’s open access institutional repository, UKnowledge, makes research from all disciplines freely available to a global audience. The repository stores, organizes, and provides open and stable access to scholarship, data, and creative works generated by the UK community, including theses, dissertations, journals, open textbooks, conference proceedings, research data, and more.
Since its establishment in 2011, UKnowledge has grown to more than 52,000 works of scholarship which have been downloaded over 17 million times in 238 countries and territories around the world. Nearly 500 new submissions are published every month, and monthly full text downloads exceed 500,000.
The open access licensing of UKnowledge’s resources not only benefits the public by providing high-quality research at no cost, but also helps researchers by increasing the impact and reach of their work. UK Libraries mints digital object identifiers (DOIs) for research made available through UKnowledge and provides usage and engagement statistics so that users can track its impact throughout its lifecycle.
For more information on UKnowledge and open access publishing, contact UKnowledge Library Specialist Kyle Bachman-Johnson at kyle.bachman-johnson@uky.edu, or visit our Publishing & Impact page.
UK Libraries can help instructors across the university find, adopt, and create open educational resources (OER) – shareable, revisable class materials that can include textbooks, articles, podcasts, videos, and more. Available to students at no cost, OER increase access to higher education by eliminating the financial burden of traditional commercial textbooks.
To support the adoption and creation of OER for use in UK classes, UK Libraries offers annual grant funding through the OER Grant Program.
First launched in 2016 as the Alternative Textbook Grant Program, the initiative has impacted thousands of students across every corner of campus. The competitive program receives applications from a wide variety of departments and distributes $25,000 across nine or ten projects each year.
The grant program was restructured in 2024, and since then has funded 27 projects from 20 departments in ten colleges across the university. Materials developed from these projects currently save UK students approximately $123,895 per year – annual cost savings that are expected to increase rapidly as new projects are completed and past ones are used year after year. Cumulative savings over the ten-year history of the Alternative Textbook/OER programs exceed $1.5 million.
The program also allows instructors to create textbooks and other resources that fit precisely into the scope and level of their courses, providing students high-quality, low-cost course materials that were not previously available at any price. Some of these resources have been adopted by instructors at other institutions.
For more information on open educational resources or the OER Grant Program, contact the Affordable Course Content Librarian at ACCLibrarian@l.uky.edu or visit our Affordable Course Content page.
UK Libraries is dedicated to helping students and researchers access open data resources for use in their projects. Open data is data that is free, openly accessible, and usable by anyone for any purpose.
Some of the most popular and versatile open data sets include:
Our librarians can provide discipline-specific strategies to help you determine your data needs, locate and evaluate relevant datasets, and develop search strategies to find the right data for your research.
Along with finding datasets and data sources, our librarians can help users plan projects, develop data management workflows, and preserve and share their data. We provide research data management support to users across all disciplines and at every stage of the research data lifecycle.
For more information on finding, managing, and sharing research data, contact Research Data Librarian Isaac Wink at isaac.wink@uky.edu, or visit our Managing Your Research Data page.
With Margaret I. King Library closed for a multi-year renovation project, The Stacks has moved to a new, temporary location in Room 2-34 in William T. Young Library.
Our dedicated team of librarians has also relocated to Young Library, where they will continue to provide expertise and services across all areas of digital and data-intensive scholarship.
Please contact TheStacks@uky.edu to inquire about the use of the space and services, or sign up for an appointment to meet via Zoom or in person with a member of our team.
