I don't know if any of this is new, but I've just had an email notification :
about their SEM pictures.
They're obviously keen to sell their images. Still, they're nice to look at.
It's not tiresome being registered, I don't get many emails from them.
SEM at London Natural History Museum
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Onlineenricosavazzi
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Unfortunately, the Natural History Museum seems to be desperate to tap into every thinkable source of income. Already several years ago they established a practice of claiming the copyright for every picture taken by anyone (including non-staff and visiting researchers) of specimens in their collections. We are talking of natural subjects like shells, rock samples etc, not man-made objects that could, in principle, be protected by copyright. I was there on a couple of fellowships several years ago and took thousands of pictures in the fossil and shell collections, which I still use for my non-profit research and scientific publication. Therefore, the copyright agreements I signed to get access to the material do not result in any income for the NHM.
There certainly are costs involved in operating an SEM, but these costs traditionally have been covered by research grants. I can hardly see any way an SEM in a public institution could pay for itself by being run as a commercial facility or by selling pictures. After all, the reason why science in general is publicly financed is that no commercial company in its own mind would be willing to finance the same type of research (which is called "non-profit" for a very good reason).
I have often wondered whether these initiatives by the NHM (and probably other public institutions and museums) are based on a substantial overestimate of the amount of money that can be collected in this way. One sure consequence is that commercial publishers are now more hesitant to publish pictures of specimens from these collections, since they are no longer available only for the cost of sending someone to the museum to photograph them. A perhaps unintended result is that these policies work against the primary function of these institutions to make their collections available for study and to the public.
There certainly are costs involved in operating an SEM, but these costs traditionally have been covered by research grants. I can hardly see any way an SEM in a public institution could pay for itself by being run as a commercial facility or by selling pictures. After all, the reason why science in general is publicly financed is that no commercial company in its own mind would be willing to finance the same type of research (which is called "non-profit" for a very good reason).
I have often wondered whether these initiatives by the NHM (and probably other public institutions and museums) are based on a substantial overestimate of the amount of money that can be collected in this way. One sure consequence is that commercial publishers are now more hesitant to publish pictures of specimens from these collections, since they are no longer available only for the cost of sending someone to the museum to photograph them. A perhaps unintended result is that these policies work against the primary function of these institutions to make their collections available for study and to the public.
--ES