The Institute of Museum and Library Services (“IMLS”) is implementing a policy that will expand the public’s access to applicable products of IMLS-funded research (the “IMLS Public Access Policy” or the “Policy”). The Policy will take effect on October 1, 2025. In the coming months, IMLS will continue to release additional detailed guidance. Please direct questions or requests for further information to imls-ogpm@imls.gov.
Public Access Policy
IMLS’s support for wide dissemination of knowledge through research, information, and resources is central to IMLS’s mission to help meet the essential information, education, research, economic, cultural, and civic needs of the people of the United States. See 20 U.S.C. 9101 et seq. The IMLS Public Access Policy comports with the agency’s mission by ensuring wide dissemination of the applicable results of IMLS-funded research. The Policy serves to advance the body of knowledge and professional practice in museums, libraries, archives, and information services.
Key Requirements
The Policy only applies to IMLS-funded research. Specifically, the Policy outlines requirements for peer-reviewed scholarly publications and the underlying scientific research data resulting from the federally funded research.
Recipients of IMLS research awards[1] made on or after October 1, 2025 (i.e. FY-2026 awards and later), must comply with the key requirements outlined in this policy.
IMLS intramural research projects that are peer reviewed and intended for scholarly publication, including but not limited to those sponsored by the Office of Research and Evaluation, will also follow the relevant policies outlined in this document.
1. Public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications
Researchers must submit a machine-readable[2] copy of the most-appropriate version of a published manuscript (see below) to the IMLS designated repository without embargo, and no later than the article publication date. This includes peer-reviewed research articles or final manuscripts published in scholarly journals, and may include peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings published in other scholarly outlets that result from federally funded research.
The most-appropriate version of the manuscript may be the “version of record”[3] (or “publisher’s version” or “final publication”), when the applicable publisher agreement explicitly allows this. If not, the most-appropriate version of the manuscript may be the author’s accepted manuscript[4] (AAM), also known as the “final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript.”
IMLS will provide further instructions on the steps researchers should take to deposit their peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from IMLS-funded research into the IMLS designated repository.
2. Public access to scientific research data
Researchers must deposit permissible scientific research data[5] underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications into a chosen repository immediately following publication. Researchers may choose the most appropriate repository[6].
Researchers should consider several factors when determining what data are “permissible” for public access: privacy principles, ethical obligations, indigenous rights[7], endangered resources, intellectual property, foreign policy and international development objectives, information security, national security considerations, personally identifiable information, and any other potential restrictions or limitations to data access, use, reuse, and disclosure. It is the researcher's responsibility to ensure that only data that meet all disclosure requirements, including all legal and ethical restrictions and applicable laws, are made publicly available.
IMLS will provide further instructions on the steps researchers should take to deposit scientific research data resulting from IMLS-funded research into a repository.
Copyright Guidance and Federal Purpose Rights
Consistent with 2 CFR § 200.315(b), federally-funded award recipients may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, under the award. Under that provision, IMLS reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories.
IMLS encourages recipients, upon submission of an applicable peer reviewed scholarly publication, to communicate to the journal or publisher that the article is subject to the IMLS Public Access Policy, under which IMLS, as the funding agency, is permitted to make the most-appropriate version of the manuscript publicly available without any embargo or delay upon publication.
Contact Us
IMLS staff are eager to receive feedback from the public and agency stakeholders. Please contact us at imls-ogpm@imls.gov.
[1] As of 2024, the only IMLS extramural programs that conduct research are the National Leadership Grants for Museums, the National Leadership Grants for Libraries, and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Programs. Individual applicable extramural research projects are specifically designated at the time of application as “Research,” “Applied Research,” or “Early Career Research.”
[2] Machine-readability is defined as “a format that can be easily processed by a computer without human intervention while ensuring no semantic meaning is lost (such as the ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2021 JATS XML standard currently used by PubMed Central).” Nelson, Alondra. 2022. “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” Office of Science and Technology Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf.
[3] The term “version of record,” generally used by open-access journals, describes the publisher’s authoritative copy of the paper, including all modifications from the publishing and peer review process, copyediting, stylistic edits, and formatting changes.
[4] The “authors accepted manuscript,” or AAM, is the version of the article following peer review, including all final revisions as well as figures, tables, and supplemental material, but not including publisher-provided copyediting or formatting.
[5] Scientific research data includes, “the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as of sufficient quality to validate and replicate research findings. Such scientific data do not include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, case report forms, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer-reviews, communications with colleagues, or physical objects and materials, such as laboratory specimens, artifacts, or field notes” (Nelson 2022).
[6] When determining the best repository for deposit, researchers should ensure the repository allows for free access to the data; aligns, to the extent practicable, with the National Science and Technology Council’s document entitled, “Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research;” assigns a Persistent Identifier (PID) for each published dataset; and meets Section 508 accessibility standards.
[7] Awardees should consider both the FAIR Principles and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, which emphasize that it may not be appropriate to share culturally sensitive information widely.