Open access materials – including articles, books, and datasets – are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
UK Libraries provides a number of open access resources to help users find research data, reduce the cost of course materials for students, and make scholarship and research outputs available to global audiences.
UK Libraries will host a drop-in event to celebrate International Open Access Week on Monday, Oct. 20 in The Stacks.
The event will provide an opportunity for UK students, faculty, and staff to meet their digital scholarship and data librarians and learn about UK Libraries’ open access resources while enjoying free snacks and refreshments.
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.
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 help promote the adoption and use of open educational resources in UK courses, UK Libraries piloted the Open Educational Resources Grant Program in 2016. Since its launch, the program has awarded 82 grants across 42 departments (see a full list of past grantees).
For more information on open educational resources, contact the Affordable Course Content Librarian at ACCLibrarian@l.uky.edu or visit our Affordable Course Content page.
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.
