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

Mon Feb 2 09:28:21 EST 2026

I previously experienced a closely related situation in which a curator demanded co-authorship solely for providing routine curatorial assistance. In this case, I personally selected the specimens for further study myself, spending a full week at the herbarium in the land of croissants doing so at significant personal expense of both time and money. Only after I had completed this work was I informed of an institutional “policy” requiring curatorial co-authorship for the removal of fragments.

At numerous other European and international herbaria, I have been permitted to sample specimens directly, with the sole requirement being appropriate acknowledgment in resulting publications. I consulted curators at my home institution and elsewhere, and the unanimous opinion was that requiring authorship in the absence of an intellectual contribution is highly unusual and unjustified. Such a practice sets a damaging precedent, whereby any curator or assistant could claim authorship on an unlimited number of papers over time where said specimens were cited, fundamentally diluting the meaning of scientific authorship.

I cited standard journal authorship guidelines, which explicitly prohibit honorary or superfluous authorship and require substantive intellectual contributions to study conception, analysis, manuscript preparation, and final approval. Contributors who do not meet these criteria should be acknowledged rather than listed as authors.

Finally, I noted that had this requirement been communicated in advance, I would have redirected my limited research time and funds elsewhere. As a more appropriate alternative, I offered either reasonable financial compensation for curatorial time, or the future deposition of well-documented specimen sets at the herbarium; options that respect curatorial labor without compromising established standards of scientific authorship. These offers were denied.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Darin S. Penneys
Associate Professor, Keeper of WNC
Department of Biology and Marine Biology
University of North Carolina Wilmington
601 S. College Rd.
Wilmington, NC  28403
Office: 910.962.3046

https://sites.google.com/view/penneys-lab/home
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

________________________________
From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Taylor, Sarah <sarah.taylor at uconn.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 2, 2026 9:11 AM
To: Scott A Schaefer <schaefer at amnh.org>; Luis Ceríaco <luisceriaco at gmail.com>; NHCOLL-new <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Access and authorship in natural history collections

[This email originated from outside of UNCW]

I have been offered authorship on publications (which I declined) twice after researcher visits to our herbarium. From the researchers' perspective, the contributions I made to their research (time, expertise on recommending specimens they might want to examine, assistance with equipment, and assistance accessing publications) merited recognition above mention in the acknowledgments section. From my perspective, I didn't offer original ideas, contribute to analysis, or write the resulting papers.

In my experience, asking for authorship in exchange for loans/research visits is definitely NOT common or a new trend. I also think it's likely to be ineffective - every collection I know of, including mine, asks researchers to a) acknowledge the collection in publications and b) send a pdf or, at the least, citation of publications, and the success rate of request (b) is well below 20%. The success rate of request (a) seems higher but I have definitely found peer-reviewed publications that use images of CONN specimens with zero reference to our herbarium anywhere in the paper.

This is an interesting topic and two more replies have come in since I started typing - I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Best,
Sarah

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Sarah Taylor, PhD

Scientific Collections Manager

George Safford Torrey Herbarium (CONN)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Connecticut
75 North Eagleville Road, Unit 3043
Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3043
U.S.A.

P: 860.486.1889
F: 860.486.4320
https://biodiversity.uconn.edu/herbarium/

Pronouns: she/her or they/them

________________________________
From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Scott A Schaefer <schaefer at amnh.org>
Sent: Monday, February 2, 2026 8:55 AM
To: Luis Ceríaco <luisceriaco at gmail.com>; NHCOLL-new <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Access and authorship in natural history collections

*External sender: This message was not sent through the UConn email system. It might be safe, but use caution before interacting with links, attachments, or requests.*

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
[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wZ5SeVd89_kAncItat_P1VY9QpO0E_pfBtJDOS8YDqfC4o6bfR6sQQNFdyg9UEAJsit-B2tQU]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20260202/b88cacce/attachment.html>