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

[Scott A Schaefer]

This sounds like an egregious abuse of the principal of reciprocity inherent to research use of museum collections and is not something I’ve heard of in my 40+ years of museum work. Whether or not such collections were built and are now maintained by “public money”, the understanding of reciprocity (= you do for me, I do for you) is part of what facilitates research use of museum collections and extends from loan approvals and processing to shipping and packaging. I would hope this example is isolated to some misplaced thinking by uninformed people.

I am also aware of other recent practices that threaten the reciprocity agreement, such as charges levied for permit applications required for both the loan approval and the export. In response, curators and collection managers may be encouraged to avoid such lending practices by refusing to participate— both in borrowing and lending to these institutions.

The community would be served by hearing from others that have been impacted by these practices.

Scott


__________________________________________

Scott A. Schaefer, Ph.D.

Dean of Science for Collections and the

       Public Understanding of Science

Director, Institute for Comparative Genomics

Curator and Professor



American Museum of Natural History<https://amnh.org/>

200 Central Park West

New York, NY 10024-5192 USA



Office: 212-769-5652

Mobile: 215-570-2943

Email: schaefer at amnh.org<mailto:schaefer at amnh.org>



From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Luis Ceríaco <luisceriaco at gmail.com>
Date: Monday, February 2, 2026 at 8:23 AM
To: NHCOLL-new <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] Access and authorship in natural history collections

EXTERNAL SENDER

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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