[Nhcoll-l] Loans to private companies

[Shoobs, Nate]

We've had some bad luck retrieving prior loans made to several environmental consulting firms. Usually these are "honest mistakes" in losing track of specimens or data, but still, the general sense of the importance of keeping track of museum material is not always there in the private sector. And the nature of the corporate world means things like specimens often get forgotten about when offices get moved.

We now only loan specimens with data to non-profit institutions and government offices.

We have however continued to make small loans of uncatalogued / duplicate material with little-to-no data to firms, as usually this is sufficient for what they want. And our collections are nevertheless open to anyone in the world if they want to study in-person. The demographic that uses the collection the most is (by far) private sector consultants studying material of species they might encounter in their environmental surveys.

RE tissues, I've never had a request from a for-profit company, but I typically require that the results of any destructive sampling be shared with the collection as a condition of the loan, and the data are kept embargoed for 5 years to allow people the opportunity to publish. I would not personally consider giving destructive sampling permission to a for-profit company if I had any suspicion they would be commercializing the results of their study of the specimens.

-Nate
--

[The Ohio State University]
Nathaniel F. Shoobs
Curator of Mollusks
College of Arts & Sciences Dept. of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212
614-688-1342 (Office)
mbd.osu.edu/collections/invertebrates<https://mbd.osu.edu/collections/invertebrates>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of David Boyd <dboyd10 at lsu.edu>
Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2026 at 10:44 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] Loans to private companies

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Dear NHColl community,



What, if any, extraordinary considerations do you take into account for tissue loans to private, for-profit companies? Our loan terms prohibit commercial use of tissues and sequence data derived therefrom. We receive requests from the biotechnology sector that are not directly commercial but that may produce profitable methodologies or technologies for use in industry. For example, projects aimed at species conservation and habitat restoration, goals that align broadly with our museum’s mission.



Do you grant requests of this nature? If so, do you alter the terms of your institution’s typical loan agreements to do so, and in what ways?


Thank you for any advice you care to share,
Dave

David A. Boyd, MSc
Collections Manager, Ichthyology and Herpetology
Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science
119 Foster Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
(225) 681-0456

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