[Nhcoll-l] Access and authorship in natural history collections

[Luis Ceríaco]

Dear colleagues,

Recently I've learned through a colleague that was requesting access to
specimens from a big European natural history institution, that it was
expected for him to include staff members for that given institution in the
authorship of any research that would come from that access, especially if
the access was above a certain number of specimens. This is apparently now
part of the official loan/access agreement of that institution.

I was quite shocked. In the last 15 years I've been an active user of
natural history collections and had my share of curatorship/collection
management work, in different countries and different continents, and I've
never encountered such "in-your-face" and abhorrent demand. Collections
have been built with public money and are kept through public money (most
of the times) - thus they should be seen as a public good, not a way to
enrich the CV of staff members.

That got me curious - is this a new trend or I've been really lucky so far?

-- 
_________________________________________________________
*Luis M. P. Ceríaco, Ph.D.*,
Commissioner  International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature
Invited Curator of the Herpetological Collections at Museu Nacional de
História Natural e da Ciência, Lisbon, Portugal
CIBIO/InBIO - Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources
University of Porto, Portugal
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Luis-Ceriaco
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0591-9978
Scopus Author ID: 51260938100
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