University of Missouri
AC-11: Access to Research

MOspace is the digital institutional repository of the University of Missouri System, and is a joint initiative of the University Libraries, the Office of Library Systems, and the Division of Information Technology. It is a permanent digital storehouse of research and knowledge, focusing on works created by those connected with the University of Missouri. MOspace is a place where faculty, staff and students can store their intellectual output, and depend upon a permanent URL. MOspace allows the library to preserve and provide open access to items in a more permanent way than posting to a website. The project uses DSpace, an open source application developed at MIT, which provides permanent URLs for documents deposited through it to the MOspace server. The Libraries are committed to this ongoing effort as part of the next generation of library collections.

The Graduate School, which requires deposit of theses and dissertations, but does allow them to be restricted to local access if the author requests. MOspace also accommodates MU authors with federally grant-funded research who need to deposit their results in an open access repository, although many authors prefer discipline-based repositories like PubMed Central when available. The libraries have hosted activities for Open Access Week each fall, and the library director has taken forward recommendations on open access policies and support, but no policy, author funding or recommendation has been approved by Faculty Council or the campus academic administration. Aside from theses and dissertations, the content we have in MOspace has all been recruited or harvested individually.