In April 2020 the SVP sent a letter to more than 300 paleontology journals with proposals for “significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology”.
Carolin Haug and more than 40 colleagues welcome the initiative but consider the proposals to be counter-productive. The authors explain this in their comments.
One of the most important statements of Haug et al. is certainly the following: … “we reject the notion implied by the SVP letter that studying and describing specimens from private collections represent an unethical behaviour” and the impression that “The statements in the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) in our view shed a rather negative
light on amateur palaeontologists/private collectors/citizen scientists,…”.
Haug et al. are convinced that Amateur palaeontologists, or more generally, amateur scientists, contribute to science in an essential way”, which we agree with.
The article is published in the Paläontologische Zeitschrift:
Haug et al. 2020. Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil‑based scientific data”: the importance of private collections. PalZ 94: 413-429. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12542-020-00522-x