Conflicts of interest

The structural conflict

The object is owned by the person publishing the record about it. Scholarship that raises the standing of an object generally raises its market standing too. That conflict cannot be designed away, and pretending otherwise would be the least credible thing this project could do.

What can be done is to make the conflict expensive to act on:

• No figures. The project does not publish what the object cost or what it might be worth. A build gate enforces this.
• Confidence cannot exceed evidence. Enforced by the build, not by judgement.
• The object's own record is the weakest-evidenced thing on the site, and is listed in the census at the lowest evidence tier, below every institutional record. That is where its documentation currently places it.
• Negative findings are published. Including the ones that are unhelpful to the object.
• Corrections are published with the corrector's name, so the record of the project being wrong is as visible as the record of it being right.

Sale

If the object were ever offered for sale, that fact would be disclosed on this page and on the object record before any sale process began, and the project would stop publishing new scholarly claims about it for the duration. A scholarly record maintained during a sale is sales material.

Paid work

Anyone paid by this project — a conservator, a photographer, a specialist — is named on the work they did. Any research grant made by the project is conclusion-neutral by construction: payment is for the work and the write-up, and it does not depend on what is found. A grant that produces a negative result is a grant that worked.

Dealers and auction houses

The project has no commercial relationship with any dealer or auction house. If one contributes evidence, that is welcome and the contribution is labelled with its source and tier like any other.