Makartchuck Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia Received 16.03.2016, received in revised form 21.04.2016, accepted 19.05.2016 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. <...> Introduction Suppose open access to museum images in the public domain and the transparency of workflows could be an indicator for the transparency of information kept at public institutions all over the world. <...> Suppose societies wish to promote and endorse publishing highresolution images on museum web sites, to improve national legislation and museum policies related to copyright protection, workflows to obtain images for scholarly purposes, and real life practice of obtaining images for scholarly projects. <...> This will demonstrate social intentions to make public institutions less similar to private gardens with ‘no trespassing’ signs. © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: inna.kizhner@gmail.com – 1618 – In addition, social, cultural and economic benefits of getting access to high quality museum content may be so great that the expectations of a better educated public will eventually lead museums to open their collections. <...> According to a recent body of literature, restrictive museum policies prevent scholars from disseminating high-quality research, burden innovative educational projects, and are in the way of sharing important works of art in the public domain (Crews 2012, Bielstein 2006, Lyon 2006, Petri 2014, Terras 2015). <...> Museum images in the public domain may or may not be hard to obtain as high resolution digital copies under different legislations (Kelly 2013, Petri 2014, Crews 2012). <...> Licensing Images from Russian Museums for an Academic Project the right of the public to get access to high resolution digital images in the public domain is getting more and more valuable as numerous images <...>