How Much Can We Charge For Our Collections

[Russ Shiel]

On Sat, 14 Oct 1995, Dr.Kamarudin Mat Salleh-FSH wrote:

>[snip]...what would be the price per herbarium (or zoological or insect)
specimen you want to quote ? Shall we start a new discussion on this
issue ?<

Could I raise a nit-picky point here?...I too am being beseiged by
bean-counters in a new economics-driven, administratively-overloaded
once-research-orientated facility...but suppose I get a request for a
rotifer from a rockpool on Cape Barren Island, Furneaux Group, Bass
Strait...the bean counter says 'charge for it!'....

Okay - the 4 plankton samples obtained from Cape Barren Is effectively
cost $A2000 in helicopter time (research grant), and 2 hrs of my time (not
counting the adrenalin produced during the flight in....)....$270 at
CSIRO's rate for me, so $2270 divided by 4 (per sample, okay?), so that's
$567.50/sample.  Now the client only wants one animal, maybe a couple in
case the preparation he/she is going to make isn't ideal, so what's the
plan - divide the sample cost by the number of specimens therein, and
charge accordingly?

Riiight...subsample count to check how many critters are in there (1 hr
with replicates for accuracy)...say we get 10,000 in the sample (these are
small critters, O.K.? sampled with a 50 um plankton net...)...does this
mean that to satisfy the letter of the bean-counting law, I have to charge
the client 0.06c for one animal, 0.12c for two, and $135 for the hour that
it took me to resolve how many were in there...am I missing something
here?

Russ in Oz
Calling for reason
in a bean-beleaguered world