[Taxacom] Privacy laws and Science

[Mary Barkworth]

It sounds as if  we should be asking for permission to include the
person's name and the date of determination when sharing information
with others. I can see this working reasonably well for annotations. As
I said, taxonomists that I have spoken with are happy to make it known
that they have looked at our specimens. The same approach should work
for new collections, but it is more paperwork. On the other hand,
perhaps we can also use the "your name will be in lights", admittedly
dull lights, to encourage collecting in areas of interest by lay people.
Their name would be added to a list of donors. It works when requesting
financial donations.  The problematic area is existing collections,
particularly those collected by individuals who are alive but not
active. Chasing down permission slips would be a horrendous task.
 
Mary