About MSpace

MSpace is one of the University of Manitoba's institutional repositories, supporting related stakeholders and contributing to Manitoba’s academic research environment by advancing scholarship and fostering open access to research. The primary intention of the repository is to improve the discoverability and impact of UM (and related institutions) faculty and students' scholarship. 

Other benefits to depositing in MSpace:

• Compliance with funder and publisher open access requirements
• Long-term preservation and stable access
• Persistent, citable links to research outputs
• A reliable, nonprofit distribution method to traditional publishing options

MSpace is one of three institutional repositories that the University of Manitoba Libraries supports. As broadly described by the UML Content Deposit Guidelines, MSpace accepts scholarly works. These include resource types such as theses, preprints, working papers, articles, books and book chapters, technical reports, conference papers, and other primarily textual works. Accepted formats include Plain and Rich Text (.txt, .rtf); Word (.docx, .doc); Portable Document File (.pdf); and other textual formats (e.g., .msg, .latex). Images (e.g., .jpg, .png, .gif, .tif, .bmp, .eps) submitted independent of text may be considered on a case-by-case basis. 

A record in MSpace is intended to describe the main work that is being submitted. A submission can include supplementary works, provided they fall within the accepted formats. If there are materials integral to the work being submitted that are excluded from the MSpace deposit (e.g., video, multimedia, programming code, datasets), depositors are encouraged to provide references to those materials in the metadata where applicable (i.e., DOI, resource type). 

MSpace uses the open-source repository software DSpace. Scholarship deposited in MSpace is found in Google Scholar, Theses Canada, OpenAlex, and OpenAIRE Explore. Ongoing improvements to discovery, through platform enhancements and metadata standards such as ORCID and ROR, help ensure that deposited works are widely distributed across the open scholarship ecosystem.

MSpace staff members maintain the repository. These members comprise personnel from both the Research Services and Digital Strategies (RSDS) and Systems units of the University of Manitoba Libraries, with principal oversight provided by the Research Services librarian in collaboration with the Coordinator, RSDS. This oversight includes representing the fiduciary considerations of the host institution through the establishment of and compliance with the MSpace Policy.

The Policy establishes the rights and obligations for both MSpace staff and submitters and/or creators. The curation, metadata, and preservation processes are outlined in the Policy and identify permissions and licensing in accordance with Canadian Copyright Law. Depositors are asked to accept the Deposit License as part of depositing. 

MSpace comprises many communities and their associated collections. There are two self-deposit collections to meet graduation and funder mandate obligations: the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies’ Electronic Thesis and Practica collection, and the University of Manitoba Scholarship collection. The remaining communities and collections are either mediated deposit (i.e., creators submit content to a university, department, or centre, which then deposits it on their behalf) or item-mapped (i.e., collections defined by affiliation, where related materials deposited elsewhere are grouped together). Communities and/or their collections are subject to change in partnership with MSpace staff. UM faculty are welcome to contact MSpace staff to pursue the creation of a new collection.

Copyright and permissions

When you deposit your work in MSpace, you retain your creator rights (also known as moral rights). You do not transfer copyright ownership of that work to the university. For research publication, depositors agree to the MSpace Copyright Distribution License. Students submitting a thesis or practicum will agree to the MSpace Thesis/Practicum Copyright License. If the work has multiple authors/creators, depositors are expected to obtain their co-creators’ permission before depositing the work in MSpace. Any third-party copyright protected materials must be included with appropriate permission, a license, or a valid copyright exemption as applicable.

Access conditions

One of the fields included in the MSpace submission form is the access rights field, which governs when your work becomes open online in MSpace. The default access rights option is the open option, which makes your submission immediately available online without restriction once it is accepted for deposit. If the open access right cannot be applied to the work, then you can select the embargo access right option. Access to the work will then be delayed from the time of deposit until the release date, or Date of Availability, which you can select in your MSpace submission form. See the Research Publication Deposit and Thesis/Practicum Deposit guides for instructions on how to apply an embargo. Note: Embargo periods should be kept as short as possible in keeping with the purpose of MSpace to facilitate access and discovery of open scholarship.

In extraordinary circumstances, MSpace will restrict access to materials. Such requests are adjudicated as per the MSpace Policy. See the Withdrawal Request section for more information. 

Withdrawal requests

Requests for withdrawal of MSpace materials will be managed in accordance with the MSpace Digital Repository Mandate and Policy. Withdrawing an item from MSpace will not account for potentially available cached or harvested copies that may be available elsewhere on the internet. 

MSpace currently does not have any automated mechanism to prevent AI harvesting or selectively identify use preferences (i.e., distinguish between discovery harvesting, such as by Google Scholar, and harvesting for AI machine learning). MSpace, like many open repositories, has employed software to manage traffic from AI bots, preventing them from overwhelming the repository.

You can indicate your AI use preferences by stating your rights in your material: see the Faculty of Graduate Studies Artificial Intelligence Training Statement as an example. For more information on AI, rights retention, and the current dynamic legal state of defending these rights, see the Generative AI page of the Copyright Office. 

UM Copyright Office