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UKnowledge

This guide provides information about the University of Kentucky's institutional repository, UKnowledge.

UKnowledge not only provides access to the research and scholarship generated by the University of Kentucky (UK) community, it also functions as an online platform that:

  • Archive and share research outputs (e.g., datasets and publications), especially in compliance with funding agencies' public access requirement, e.g., entomology research data
  • Hosts professional profiles to showcase UK researchers' intellectual outputs and accomplishments.  Visit the Researchers Gallery to view existing profiles.

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If you have any questions or suggestions for UKnowledge services, please feel free to contact the UKnowledge staff by e-mail.

What Faculty Said about UKnowledge Services

“The perfect way to keep a permanent and world-wide accessible archive of your research that complies with your publishers’ protection requirements. Excellent assistance from UKnowledge staff, from initial query to copyright checks to implementation.”

Dr. Andrew Hippisley portrait    Dr. Andrew Hippisley
Former Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Kentucky

Services about Author Rights

The UKnowledge staff also provides consultation services about author rights. 

The SPARC Author Addendum page states:

"The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.  Assigning your rights matters...  An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law." 

It is also important to note that "[t]ransferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others."

Visit this page for more information on author rights.  Also feel free to contact the UKnowledge staff by e-mail for assistance. 

Scholarly Communication Topics of Interest

In addition to author rights, there are other scholarly communication topics that are of interest:

If you have any questions about these topics, please feel free to contact the UKnowledge staff by e-mail.

Benefits of UKnowledge Services

UKnowledge real-time map

UKnowledge services are provided by UK Libraries and are free to all members of the UK community.  They bring about a number of benefits:

  • Disseminate your scholarly and creative work globally with stable, permanent URLs
  • Facilitate free access and linking to your scholarly outputs so that you gain more recognition and your research potentially receives more citations and generates more impact
  • Receive monthly e-mail notifications about the download counts of your scholarly outputs
  • Track the geographic and institutional distributions of the downloads of your work
  • Demonstrate the global reach of your research with a linkable map
  • Illustrate the online mentions and potential impact of your publications with the Altmetric.com analysis
  • Present a professional online presence to enhance the visibility of your expertise and intellectual accomplishments
  • Optimize search engines’ indexing of your work so that more people around the world can easily find and benefit from your insights and expertise
  • Ensure that your scholarly and creative work is securely archived and preserved for future access and reuse
  • Offer a viable alternative to existing publishing avenues so that scholarly materials with limited commercial value can be disseminated widely
  • Last but not least, UK Libraries provides customized services and ongoing support to meet your scholarly communication needs

ORCID ID for Researchers

There is an international initiative that addresses problems related to confirming the identity of researchers with similar or the same name. It is ORCID, which issues unique identifiers to distinguish individual researchers. Different stakeholders in the research community, including funding agencies, higher education institutions, and publishers, plan to adopt the ORCID ID as a means to disambiguate the identity of researchers and to track their scholarly activities and contributions. More information about ORCID is available from the video below. 

Click here to register for an ORCID ID. Once you have created the ID, take some time to add information about yourself and your research outputs.  This will help build your professional online presence and reputation.  Last but not least, remember to add the ORCID ID to your CV, scholarly publications, grant applications, and academic profiles such as a personal Web page. This will help clarify your identity as a scholar among others who have names similar to or same as yours.