Museums tend to cope with a tension resulting from a conflict between their mission to disseminate the information about museum objects and the necessity to limit access to object representations/digital reproductions. Resolving this tension involves increasing knowledge on how museums imagine providing permissions to publish digital reproduc-tions of their objects in an open access publication. The paper discusses the results of an experiment where a part of Russian museums provided digital reproductions and permis-sions to promote their institutions in an academic settings.

Keywords: digital images, copyright, museum permissions, Russian museums.