Re: Kirkaldy and SVP Ethics Statement

[MKIRKALDY@aol.com]

cbennett@bridgeport.edu writes:
<SNIP>  
> Specimens legally held in private hands are no less a part 
> of our national heritage than those in museums, and if they carry 
> scientific information, that information should be disseminated.  
> Manuscripts should not be rejected simply because the specimens 
> are not in a museum, rather manuscripts should be evaluated on
> their merits.

From Nature Guide to Authors:
       5.3 Materials. As a condition of publication, authors are required to 
make materials and methods used freely available to academic researchers for 
their own use. Authors are required to state in the Methods whether there are 
conditions for use of methods and materials, and to provide full disclosure 
of the conditions on their website. 

From Science Magazine Information for Contributors:
Conditions of Acceptance:  
       When a paper is accepted for publication in Science, it is understood 
that:   any reasonable request for materials and methods necessary to verify 
the conclusions of the experiments reported must be honored.    
___

A particular case in point is the recent posting by Dinogeorge on the "Odd 
Chinese Dinosaur."  Suppose I found/bought this fossil and wanted to publish 
a description of it.  I write (such as was in the press release) that "the 
cranium, teeth, scapula, vertebra, ribs, shank, coccyx [sic] and the claw of 
the dinosaur skeleton were all preserved intact.  The skull is 0.35 meters 
long and 2.5 meters wide [sic!]. The length between the neck vertebra and the 
pygal [sic] is 2.35 meters, and the tailbone [sic] is 1.8 meters long."

I submit this description to a journal, along with a few digital pictures and 
page costs, then put the specimen in my underground vault, refusing to let 
anyone else see what is after all MY research.  Since this is an 
extraordinary fossil, certainly my description is enough to satisfy the 
requirement that something is better than nothing.  So what if Chris Brochu 
is skeptical of the skull measurements or Tom Holtz is astounded by the 
finding of the first dinosaur coccyx, which seems to indicate the 
phylogenetic relationship between dinosaurs and tailless apes.

Mary
mkirkaldy@aol.com