This morning the committee that is writing the new Mexican regulations for scientific collecting permits discussed a topic of interest to many of you, and I was asked to use TAXACOM to explore the opinions of foreign taxonomists. The point is an article of the law which in the proposal reads as follows:

"In the case that the material collected in Mexico is used to describe new species, it will be necessary for the foreign scientist to deposit part of the type material in a Mexican collection with an infrastructure that guarantees its preservation and maintenance"

We went for almost two hours over this point without reaching an agreement. For several of us the article expressed something which is a matter of principle. Oponents to the article, however, felt that it may cause unecessary concern among foreign taxonomists without improving what is almost a rule of cooperation between the main Mexican collections and their foreign counterparts.

Your comments will be useful for our discussion.