University of Missouri
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The Missouri Sunshine Law was introduced in the General Assembly as Senate Bill 1 in 1973. This was seven years after the Freedom of Information Act was passed in Congress and the same year that the United States Senate Watergate Committee conducted its hearings. With the passage of Senate Bill 1, Missouri became one of the earliest advocates of ensuring that meetings and records would be open to the public throughout all aspects of government. Missouri’s commitment to openness in government is clearly stated in § 610.011, RSMo, of the Sunshine Law: “It is the public policy of this state that meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies be open to the public unless otherwise provided by law. Sections 610.010 to 610.200 shall be liberally construed and their exceptions strictly construed to promote this public policy.” https://www.ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/publications/missourisunshinelaw.pdf?sfvrsn=4 a. As the library subscribes to certain journals, faculty either receive a discounted open access fee or no fee at all. i. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences- MU researchers receive a discounted open access fee of $1000, compared to the $1350 regular fee. ii. The American Chemical Society offers a discounted open access fee to MU affiliates. iii. The Electrochemical Society- MU affiliates wanting to published in the Journal of Electrochemcial Society and ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology can publish open access at no charge. There are no limits on the number of papers. iv. Water Environment Research- The open access fee is waived for MU affiliates

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. a. MU doesn’t have an open access policy. b. The repository available to use is MOspace i. 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. ii. 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.