The National Park Service is finalizing its plan for profit sharing with corporations that extract organisms from America's national parks and develop commercial uses for those organisms. Under the latest version of the proposal, any of the nearly 400 national parks could enter into a "benefits-sharing agreement” with corporate research firms.

The companies would provide the National Park Service, NPS, with monetary or compensation for any profits derived from use of park resources, but under the alternative preferred by the Park Service, public disclosure of the royalty or other financial terms of these agreements would be optional, not required.

"Our national parks are not corporate laboratories,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, PEER, a national association of workers in natural resources agencies. PEER is urging the Park Service not to allow commercial development of park resources. "If the Park Service is determined to walk this treacherous path, it needs to do so in the light of day without deals cloaked in proprietary secrecy," Ruch said.

Several thousand scientists conduct studies each year involving national park research specimens. The commercial use or sale of research specimens themselves is prohibited by regulation, but the commercial use of knowledge derived from specimens through research is not prohibited.

Currently, the Park Service does not negotiate benefits-sharing agreements. This would remain the case under Alternative A, the no action alternative. The Park Service would continue to issue research permits, and research specimens would continue to be usable for approved research purposes - including activities that might lead to discoveries that could be useful for health care, nutrition, agriculture, environmental management, industrial, or other processes with potential commercial or other economic value.