Click here for more specifics on the AMCC Acquisition Policies

Tissues accepted for the museum's collections shall meet the following general conditions:

a) The specimens are relevant to and consistent with the purposes and activities of the Museum.

b) The Museum can provide for the storage and preservation of the specimens under conditions that ensure their availability and meet with professionally accepted standards for collection preservation.

c) It is intended that specimens shall remain in the collections as long as they retain their physical integrity and their relevance for the purposes of the Museum.

d) All specimens should be associated with full data, preferably involving a voucher specimen (generally a specimen housed in a research collection, or, as a last resort, photographs and/or digital images to be annotated and archived by the Museum; documentation may also include a field identification).

e) All acquisitions, whether obtained through direct collection in the field, gifts, loans, exchanges, or purchases, must be obtained legally and when appropriate must be accompanied by supporting documentation.

f) Specimens known or suspected to contain disease organisms of potential danger to humans or involving serious ethical issues of human research will not be accessioned into the collection without specific approval of the Provost.

For both Donation or Internal Transfers, the AMNH Registrar Office puts at your disposition a form, including US Fish and Wildlife Permits forms.

It is required that you provide a signed copy of the form with all required permits when donating or transferring your samples to the AMCC facilities

For the Donation form, click here: PDF

For Fish and Wildlife 3-177 forms, Clik here: 3-177.pdf

Please visit the AMNH Registrar Site for more details on the Accession Process

Do I lose ownership of my samples if I donate them to the AMCC?

If you are an AMNH researcher, the samples you have collected while at the AMNH belong to the institution, not to you. Therefore, donating your specimens to the AMCC does not change the status of ownership of the tissues.

If you are an external donor, yes: your tissue are DONATED, and therefore become the property of AMNH.

HOWEVER: Ownership by the AMCC does not mean you lose all control over where the tissue goes, or to whom it goes.

The AMCC has institutioned 3 levels of donor control of his or her samples:

1. Restriction: Validity = 5 years. Restriction means that a donor has the right to restrict both electronic and physical access to his or her samples by the scientific community (i.e. by not having their samples posted on the AMCC online database). This can happen, for example, if a researcher is in the process of writing a manuscript and does not want to run the risk of being 'scooped'. There are many other reasons why a researcher would restrict access to tissue samples.

2. Permission: Validity = ad nauseum. The samples are posted online, and therefore seen by the scientific community and thus requested on loan. The Permission allows the donor a right of veto the loan of his or her samples if he or she deems the loan request to be unreasonable.

3. Notification: Validity = ad nauseum. The samples are posted online, can be sent on loan, the donor does not wish to veto any loan request BUT the donor would like to be notified when his or her tissues go on loan.

3'. I-don't-want-to-be-bothered-each-time-a-loan-of-my-tissue-comes-in: is a big favorite. You leave the responsibility to the AMCC to handle accession and loan request of your tissues. The AMCC keeps a tight and precise record for each loan, in any case, so you can always ask for a loan report on your tissues if you so desire, at anytime.