Contact us at TRACE@utk.edu for help with V.O.L. Journals!
V.O.L. stands for Volunteer, Open-Access, Library-hosted Journals. V.O.L. Journals represent partnerships between the University of Tennessee (UT) University Libraries and journals or conference proceedings published, edited, and/or founded by researchers and scholars affiliated with UT.
See the list of currently published V.O.L. Journals.
The UT Libraries provides expertise and services to support journal publishers. We provide a platform for journal publishing, mint DOIs, offer guidance on journal indexing, lead consultations related to best practices in journal publishing as outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics, and partner with editors and publishers in numerous other ways. V.O.L. Journals is not a publisher, but partners with publishers to improve their visibility and sustain their operations.
Anyone with Internet access can read or access V.O.L. Journals because each journal is an open access publication. Any researcher or scholar affiliated with UT who wants to start (or transfer) a journal should contact the UT Libraries.
Making research open access supports the land-grant mission of UTK and allows people from all backgrounds to view helpful information. Open access research can be more easily viewed and downloaded, adding to the researcher’s overall impact in their field and beyond.
Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange (TRACE) is UT's institutional open-access repository. It is a publicly-accessible archive of research and creative work done by the UT Knoxville research communities. V.O.L. Journals is separate from TRACE, but both of these services (the repository TRACE and the journal distribution platform V.O.L. Journals) are products of the same company, bepress.
TRACE contains scholarly works by UT faculty, staff, and graduate students, as well as documents from the University Archives. Content includes journal articles, technical reports, data sets, theses and dissertations, conference papers and presentations, book chapters, and other works. Scholarly outputs, creative work from faculty and graduate students, and materials that are of historical value to the university are included in the scope of the collection. In addition, undergraduate student work that is sponsored or approved by a faculty member, academic department, or campus unit may be added.