MOspace is the freely available online repository for scholarship and other works by University of Missouri faculty, students, and staff.
You retain copyright, and we provide access.
How does this work? Once items are submitted, the platform can provide statistics like number of downloads and which countries those downloads come from. Materials freely available on the web often reach a wider audience than those available in high-cost journals. For example, a postprint of the following article was added to MOspace in 2018.
Fisher, P. J., & Yao, R. (2017). Gender differences in financial risk tolerance. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 191-202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.03.006
Your article was recently accepted for publication and you want to make sure your research has the widest reach and impact. One way to make sure this happens is retaining your author rights.
Traditional publishing agreements sign your copyright away to the publisher, lessening your impact as an author. When you don’t hold your copyright, you might not be allowed to give copies to your class or distribute it among colleagues. And depending on what you sign, you aren’t allowed to put your article on your webpage or in an online depository, further limiting your exposure.
So how do you make sure you retain your copyright? Publishing agreements are negotiable. Know your rights and consider using the SPARC author addendum* to modify your agreement. The SPARC author addendum is a free and legal resource that helps you easily modify your publishing agreement.
*The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.
At MU Libraries, we’re committed to making access to research more sustainable, affordable and open. And we need your help!
In traditional publishing models, scholars surrender their copyright to commercial publishers in order to disseminate their research findings in scholarly journals. Publishers then sell or rent that same content back to the institution through journal subscriptions—at ever increasing prices. This unsustainable practice costs institutions millions of dollars every year and creates barriers to access for many. Open access publishing encourages scholars to retain their rights and make their work freely available online, increasing the availability and impact of research.
What You Can Do:
Retain Your Rights: No matter where you publish, the single most important thing you can do to make scholarly publishing more sustainable and equitable is Retain Your Rights. It’s your copyright – don’t just sign it away! Contracts are often negotiable. And read those agreements: you may have more rights to share your research than you realize.
Know Your Options: Choose the right venue for your research and know your open access options. If you’re an editor or manuscript reviewer, ask about the journal’s OA options.
Share Your Work: Deposit your research in MOspace, MU’s Digital Institutional Repository. Submitting your work to MOspace is easy. Just log in with your SSO and complete the Creative Commons license.
Read the OA policies of journals or publishers for which you edit or review.
Check out the attention received by your department in MOSpace, thanks to Open Access. Click on your school/department, scroll to the bottom, and click on “show statistical information.”
Predatory publishing doesn’t just take advantage of authors by misrepresenting review, editorial, and fee structures. It also hinders access to the work itself, hurting the overall enterprise of research. The epidemic of predatory journals reached serious enough heights in 2016 that the Federal Trade Commission charged OMICS, one such publisher of hundreds of predatory journals, for its deceptive practices.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” says Janice Dysart, Science Librarian and creator of the Where to Publish Your Research guide. “Be wary of these email solicitations from publishers trying to get you to submit articles to their journals.” She recommends using the Think Check Submit checklist to determine whether a publisher is legitimate.
Anyone can fall victim to predatory journal publishers. Jung Ha-Brookshire, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, College of Human Environmental Sciences, and Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Textile and Apparel Management, relates her experience after a graduate student recommended a journal a few years ago. She says, “I didn’t think twice about it. We submitted our paper and got accepted without any revisions. Then they were asking us to send money somewhere in Pakistan.” She still didn’t realize what was happening because she hadn’t even heard of “predatory journals.”
That all changed about a year later when she learned of a list of predatory journals from her colleagues. “We found out that our journal was on that list,” she says. They tried to withdraw their work from the publication but couldn’t. Because the journal wasn’t legitimate, the article could only be found via the specific URL and not by searching, so they pulled the publication information from their CVs. Jung says, “We had to take that manuscript as a loss because we couldn’t even take that paper to other publishers since, technically, it is already published.”
After that experience, Jung now checks with her subject librarian, Noël Kopriva, every time she encounters a journal she hasn’t heard of, “no matter how good the website looks.” Jung advises, “Be careful with choosing the right journals. Do not get fooled by address, location, a beautiful website, and a wonderful set of editorial board names. Check with your librarian first when in doubt!”
There are many options for MU researchers to make their work available open access, but one option available for all University of Missouri faculty is to make a copy available in the MOspace institutional repository.
We are working on several ways to help maximize the reach and persistence of your scholarship and increase awareness of MOspace as an option for Open Access scholarship. As we collect and analyze data about what our researchers are publishing, we are finding that many articles are already available via paid, “gold” Open Access (represented in gold in the images below). When we can, we are collecting these articles and preserving them in MOspace as an additional safeguard to ensuring their long-term availability and accessibility. We are currently processing 371 articles from 2019 and 2020 that meet various criteria for this stage of the project, 76 have already been included in MOspace, and more are on the way. Paid, full Open Access is great but still represents only a fraction MU’s total research output. We are working on ways to reach out individually to authors whose publications qualify for inclusion in MOspace (such as by publisher or funder policy) to encourage authors to upload their manuscripts/postprints whenever possible.
Even articles that are published with a traditional (non-Open Access) license can often be included in an institutional repository in the form of the final manuscript or postprint (your final, post-peer-review “draft”). The image below shows at least 1,095 articles published by MU authors (according to Scopus) in 2019 that currently have no known freely-available full text online, but could be made available in a repository such as MOspace on the basis of the publisher’s standard “green open access” policy. This would make the clear majority of MU research output openly available in some form (gold, hybrid, bronze, and green are all forms of Open Access availability under different terms).
The following image shows the publication activity by publisher, and also helps show how much of our output that is currently “paywalled” could potentially be made available. Each bar represents the number of MU articles published by that publisher in 2019 (according to Scopus), and the red portion represents the number of those articles for which there is currently no available open access copy. Nearly all of these top publishers (each of the top 6 and many others) will allow authors to deposit most article manuscripts in institutional repositories such as MOspace via a green open access policy. The green segments represent where an author, co-author, or other delegate has already done so.
There are many options for MU researchers to make their work available open access, but one option available for all University of Missouri faculty is to make a copy available in the MOspace institutional repository.
We are working on several ways to help maximize the reach and persistence of your scholarship and increase awareness of MOspace as an option for Open Access scholarship. As we collect and analyze data about what our researchers are publishing, we are finding that many articles are already available via paid, “gold” Open Access (represented in gold in the images below). When we can, we are collecting these articles and preserving them in MOspace as an additional safeguard to ensuring their long-term availability and accessibility. We are currently processing 371 articles from 2019 and 2020 that meet various criteria for this stage of the project, 76 have already been included in MOspace, and more are on the way. Paid, full Open Access is great but still represents only a fraction MU’s total research output. We are working on ways to reach out individually to authors whose publications qualify for inclusion in MOspace (such as by publisher or funder policy) to encourage authors to upload their manuscripts/postprints whenever possible.
Even articles that are published with a traditional (non-Open Access) license can often be included in an institutional repository in the form of the final manuscript or postprint (your final, post-peer-review “draft”). The image below shows at least 1,095 articles published by MU authors (according to Scopus) in 2019 that currently have no known freely-available full text online, but could be made available in a repository such as MOspace on the basis of the publisher’s standard “green open access” policy. This would make the clear majority of MU research output openly available in some form (gold, hybrid, bronze, and green are all forms of Open Access availability under different terms).
The following image shows the publication activity by publisher, and also helps show how much of our output that is currently “paywalled” could potentially be made available. Each bar represents the number of MU articles published by that publisher in 2019 (according to Scopus), and the red portion represents the number of those articles for which there is currently no available open access copy. Nearly all of these top publishers (each of the top 6 and many others) will allow authors to deposit most article manuscripts in institutional repositories such as MOspace via a green open access policy. The green segments represent where an author, co-author, or other delegate has already done so.
As libraries and researchers in the United States and around the world continue to respond to budgetary and inflationary price pressures by increasingly relying on interlibrary loan and other delivery services instead of instant full-text search and availability via subscription, making your work available this way helps ensure that it is searchable, discoverable, and reviewable by all and can lead to higher usage and citation of the final published version. MOspace can also be home to books and other forms of research and scholarship, too! Please contact your subject specialist, email us at MOspace, see the guide, or submit works online if you are interested in maximizing the reach of your scholarship via MOspace.
Open access refers to the free access of online resources and is of particular importance when those resources are research articles, papers and publications. Open access makes these resources available to more people in more places. The University of Missouri Libraries support the goals of open access for MU research materials though the provision of MOspace, the MU institutional repository. MOspace is an online repository for creative and scholarly works created by MU faculty, students, staff, and departments.
What difference does open access make? Materials freely available on the web often reach a wider audience than those available in high-cost journals. For example, a postprint of the following article was added to MOspace in 2018.
Fisher, P. J., & Yao, R. (2017). Gender differences in financial risk tolerance. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 191-202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.03.006
In the past six months, the postprint in MOspace was downloaded 350 times by users in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Germany. The top ten countries for all MU material downloaded from MOspace in the past six months are:
United States;
Germany;
Philippines;
United Kingdom;
China;
India;
Canada;
Indonesia;
France; and
Australia.
Additional countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are reflected in the top 40 countries with MOspace users. Most of these users were referred from internet browsers or search engines including Google, Google Scholar, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo.
Open access supports the efforts of MU researchers by making their research more widely available and supports scholars around the world by ensuring free and open access to important research. To find out more:
This week is Open Access Week! Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Recently we asked Dr.Julie Kapp, MPH, PhD, FACE, Associate Professor at the School of Medicine why she considers open access when publishing her research.
I published open access because anyone can access the paper, regardless of institutional affiliation or journal subscriptions. There is a demonstrated citation advantage. Open access also facilitates broader diffusion and dissemination of your ideas inside and outside the academic community. That means it is more accessible to journalists and bloggers who may write about your work. And isn’t the purpose of science to have a broader societal benefit? Open access allows anyone with an interest to learn about your work.
Why was it important despite the fee to move your article out from behind the paywall? Do you see a benefit to having taken the open access route?
For this particular paper, a lot of the interest comes from the topic and the timing of my paper. Still, it being open access no doubt facilitated its accessibility and circulation. This paper was highlighted in Discover Magazine, The New York Times, Yahoo Lifestyle, Psychology Today, an Australian blog, and the official news broadcast of Israel, among other outlets.
Advice to others?
If you have the funding, I would highly recommend open access. If you do not have the funding, our Departments and Schools/Colleges should consider creating resources tagged for open access requests, if we are to be competitive with top schools.
Read the OA policies of journals or publishers for which you edit or review.
Check out the attention received by your department in MOSpace, thanks to Open Access. Click on your school/department, scroll to the bottom, and click on “show statistical information.”
