Acknowledgement and Copyright/Work Products
What do I need to know about publications and other work products?
We require acknowledgment of IMLS assistance in all publications and other products resulting from the project. Products should be distributed for free or at cost unless we have given you written approval for another arrangement. We require that you include with your final report one copy of each project produced with IMLS funds. You may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed under an award or for which ownership was purchased. We reserve, for federal government purposes, a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work and authorize others to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work.
How is information shared about IMLS projects?
We encourage creators of works resulting from IMLS funding to share their work whenever possible through forums such as institutional or discipline-based repositories, open-access journals, or other media. Wide dissemination of the results of IMLS-funded projects advances the body of knowledge and professional practice in museum, library, and information services.
We may share grant applications, grant products, and reports with grantees, potential grantees, and the general public to further the mission of the agency and the development of museum and library services. We may disseminate these materials in a variety of ways, including through www.imls.gov, training sessions, and conferences.
What are the requirements for projects that develop digital products?
If your project involves the creation of new digital products such as digital collections, tools, or other resources, you must provide in the proposal narrative a detailed explanation of the need, intended uses, and audiences for these products. You must also include a detailed work plan for creating the digital products and complete and submit, with your grant application, the form Specifications for Projects That Develop Digital Products. Click here for this form, as well as a list of potentially useful resources, projects, and standards.
What are the requirements for projects that involve research?
Data sharing is an essential component of research and expedites the translation of research results into new knowledge and practices. If yours is a project in which you collect and analyze data, we expect you to publicly release both your results and your final data set in a timely manner. Data sharing may be accomplished, for example, by depositing your data in a broadly accessible repository. The data should be released no later than the date of publication or public release of the main findings from your final data set. We expect you to include, as part of your application’s data management plan, a plan for long-term data sharing or state why data sharing is not appropriate. Your project budget may include the costs of preparing the data for public release and for making the data publicly available, as long as these activities are undertaken and the costs are incurred during the grant award period.
We recognize that data sharing may be complicated or limited in some cases by institutional policies, local Institutional Review Board (IRB) rules, as well as local, state, and federal laws and regulations, including the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The rights and privacy of people who participate in IMLS-supported research must be protected at all times. Thus, data intended for broader use should be free of identifiers that would permit linkages to individual research participants and variables that could lead to deductive disclosure of the identity of individual participants. When data sharing is limited, you should explain the limitations in your data sharing plans.