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Ethics Q&A: Fees (for research)
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March 2001
I am a trustee of an organisation that hopes to become a registered museum. We have a unique collection of industrial tools and related documents. We are very small and rely on grants and donations. Our question is this: does the Museums Association have guidelines on charging for research on a museum's collection?
We would not charge for personal research or for responding to letters from tool enthusiasts. But we would like to charge organisations that use the collection for commercial purposes. We discovered recently that an old catalogue in our collection was used as evidence in a civil action between two companies over a copyright dispute. The company that used our material was awarded substantial compensation but we did not see a penny.
Section 3D of the MA's Ethical Guidelines on Trading and Commercial Activities states that 'if charges are made for responding to research enquiries, there should be a flexible pricing policy that distinguishes between research for commercial organisations and that for private individuals, scholars and not-for-profit organisations'.
There is no reason why you should not charge commercial enquirers. You have gone to the trouble of gathering the information, a resource like any other, and you are entitled to get others to contribute to your not-for-profit purposes if you are contributing to their for-profit ones. An alternative is to enter into a legally binding agreement that controls the reproducton rights that you hold in the material being produced.
You should not charge individual researchers who want to follow up personal interests except for recovering costs, such as photocopies. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between commercial and personal research.
You may well find that individuals with a personal interest also have a commercial one and will have enough expertise to be able to check which designs in your documents are commercially exploitable. It is proper to err on the side of generosity and accept that the motives of enquirers are often mixed and complex.
So long as nobody is actually ripping off the trust, you should allow that users of industrial collections may have entrepreneurial intentions, which can be a perfectly legitimate use of your museum.
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