Contact

Two addresses cover everything. Pick the one that matches what you are writing about and it will reach the right person faster.

Where to write

General inquiries — lumingrade@gmail.com
Questions about the collection, suggestions for items we should record, notes from librarians and archivists about their own holdings, press and interview requests, and anything that does not fit the categories below.

Corrections — lumingrade@gmail.com
Factual errors of any size: a wrong date, a misattributed plate, a garbled quotation, a misidentified figure, an outdated link to a source institution. Name the page, quote the sentence, and say what the correct fact is. A source helps but is not required. Corrections are appended to the page with a date rather than made silently — the process is set out in our editorial standards.

Rights and permissions — lumingrade@gmail.com, subject line "Rights"
Use this if you hold or represent material we have reproduced and want it altered or taken down, if you believe we have assessed an item's public-domain status wrongly, or if you want to know the terms on which our own editorial text can be reused. Two things worth knowing before you write. We do not own the source material, so we cannot grant you rights to it; permission for an original object rests with the institution named on that record, and we will point you to them. And if you are the holding institution asking us to remove something, we will take it down first and discuss it afterward. Takedown notices are handled under the process in our terms of use.

Accessibility — lumingrade@gmail.com, subject line "Accessibility"
Anything on the site that is hard or impossible for you to use, and requests for material in another form — a plate described at greater length, a page as plain text, a passage transcribed. Access problems are treated as defects. See our accessibility statement for what the site already does and what it does not.

Response times

We read everything that arrives. We are not going to promise a number of working days we cannot guarantee, so here is the honest version: corrections get looked at first, and general mail can take a while. If you have written and heard nothing in a couple of weeks, write again — it will not be taken as impatience.

There is no postal address

We do not publish one, and there is no public building and no reading room. Open Science Museum holds no original artifacts, so there is nothing here to visit, consult in person, or donate to. If you need to examine an original object, the record for it names the holding institution and links to their catalog; they are the ones to ask.

Write to us

There is no form on this page. A form needs a third-party service to process it, and we would rather keep the promise that this site sends your data nowhere than collect messages through someone else's system. Plain email does the same job: lumingrade@gmail.com, with one of the subject lines above.

What not to send

Sensitive personal information. Email is not a confidential channel and we have no secure intake. Send only what you would be comfortable sitting in an ordinary mailbox.
Physical objects. We do not accept, appraise, authenticate, value, or store artifacts, books, or documents, and we cannot tell you what yours is worth. A specialist library, auction house, or conservator can.
Unsolicited manuscripts or guest posts. We do not publish outside contributions or accept sponsored or paid placement of any kind. Pitches for topics are welcome; finished copy will not be published.
Requests for high-resolution scans. We serve web-sized images only. The holding institution named on each record supplies originals at full resolution.