New York, Sep 8 (AP) The 9/11 museum in New York City is backing off uncommon restrictions on researchers after complaints that the institution was stifling scholarship.

Until at least Aug 21, the National Sept 11 Memorial & Museum's website detailed “scholarly research rules and regulations” for access to its collection. They required researchers to let museum staffers review their work before publication and to adopt “any text changes" the museum proposed as a condition of getting the institution's “consent” to publish.

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The rules said the institution was entitled to pursue “legal remedies” if a researcher didn't comply, though the museum says it never did so and is now scrapping the review requirements and legal threat.

Early on, “our paramount concern was the misuse of donated materials to the museum for purposes of misrepresentation” about the 9/11 terror attacks, but museum leaders now feel the rules are unnecessary and unworkable, museum Executive Vice President Clifford Chanin said.

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“We've learned from our experience,” he said.

Archives and museums vary in what they ask of researchers, but experts say the 9/11 museum's rules seemed unusually onerous.

“I've never seen anything quite like that,” said Stephanie Brown, who teaches museum studies at Johns Hopkins University and has been a museum director, curator and archivist. She said the policy could prompt scholars to look elsewhere for material: “It just feels very micro-managing."

Indeed, at least two researchers have balked at the rules while seeking interviews in the last few years, said Chanin, who said the museum agreed to the interviews anyway and began reconsidering the policy after the latest scholarly objection came this summer.

Then an attorney for two filmmakers who gave a trove of 9/11-related video to the museum — but later made a critical documentary about it — accused it in an Aug. 13 letter of “restricting free historic research, exploration and use.”

“We don't think there should be any restrictions on what people publish,” filmmaker Steven Rosenbaum said in an interview.

He and his wife and co-director, Pamela Yoder, tangled with the museum this year over its objections to their documentary, “The Outsider.”

While the museum's review of their film was negotiated separately from the research rules, Rosenbaum argues that both show the institution wants “to control the story” of 9/11.

“There's a fact pattern here that's really troubling," he said, for “the place where America remembers this story and investigates it.” (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)