Publish or prohibit? The ethics of publishing on privately owned fossils

Fossils are a limited resource and the information they provide is critical for unraveling evolutionary history. Private collections sometimes contain fossils that can provide unique scientific insights, but vary in the levels of access that they provide to researchers. Some palaeontologists have advocated publishing on specimens in private collections to unlock critical data, but these observations cannot be verified independently unless future access is guaranteed. Technological approaches, such as CT-scanning, might provide some solutions to this apparent conflict, but do not solve all of these issues. As a core scientific principle, reproducibility should be the key criterion applied when making decisions over whether to publish on a specimen or not.