The National Institutes of Health has released new guidance about its policies on diversity and on child care.

One set of guidelines, or “frequently asked questions,” released Friday, concerns the NIH’s efforts to expand the pool of candidates eligible for its training grants that were historically reserved for minority students. In recent years the NIH has broadened the eligibility criteria to avoid lawsuits accusing it or its grantees of discriminating against white or Asian-American researchers.

Under the revised policy, the NIH will make grants for trainees from “disadvantaged backgrounds” regardless of race, including people from low-income families or from rural or urban neighborhoods with inferior schools. However, the new guidance makes clear, the low-income criterion does not apply to individual graduate students and postdoctoral researchers whose current incomes, low because they are trainees, fall beneath the policy’s threshold.

Another set of “frequently asked questions” describes the circumstances under which universities may use the agency’s grants to finance child care and parental leave for scientists who receive NIH grants. For example, a university could use NIH money for the costs of child care and parental leave only if the institution generally provided those benefits to all of its employees. (A separate policy on parental leave applies to recipients of the agency’s National Research Service Award Research Training Grants.) —Jeffrey Brainard