When the celebrated anatomist Antonio Scarpa died in 1832, he left an extensive collection of anatomical preparations to his university in Pavia, Italy. The collection includes his own head which, pickled, now presides grimly over his legacy in a protected museum.

Across Europe, a distressingly high number of historic scientific collections — from herbaria to minerals — are being lost or left to rot in universities. As many are autonomous institutions, they can't be told what to do by governments, they are mostly poorly funded and they tend to be oriented to the future, not the past. Historic collections have to compete for space and resources with active researchers, and are rarely prioritized.

Germany may have come up with a way to break out of this dilemma. Earlier this week, the Wissenschaftsrat, the nation's influential science council, issued a detailed list of recommendations that declares that scientific collections of potential research value should be handled as research infrastructures. It says that universities have a duty to preserve collections that it describes as being 'in critical condition' and make them available to internal and external researchers — and to integrate them as appropriate into teaching programmes.

The council also details how this should be done. Universities, it says, together with Germany's research museums and the country's main granting agency, the DFG, should develop criteria to assess the scientific merit of a collection. These criteria should then be applied in a hard-nosed fashion so that inferior collections are closed or transferred elsewhere. Furthermore, historic scientific collections in universities should be allocated the space they need, including a room for researchers to work on them and for exhibitions.

This prioritization is important. Historic objects frequently turn out to have great — often unexpected — value for cutting-edge research. Well-preserved old bones, for example, are a treasure trove for modern palaeontologists wielding new DNA-based analytical technologies. Old herbaria can similarly feed the curiosity of today's plant geneticists. Historic collections can also be unique resources for social scientists, particularly science historians. So the Wissenschaftsrat's endorsement of their fundamental value is extremely welcome.

The initiative is winning admiration for its long-term vision.

But will the recommendations be taken up? Most probably yes. The Wissenschaftsrat has serious clout because it comprises representatives from both the federal and state governments, as well as scientists. Its procedures are systematic and its analyses are thorough. It makes no recommendations that its members know they will not be able to pay for. It could, however, take some time for the recommendations to be implemented.

In the case of scientific collections, the Wissenschaftsrat proposes that the federal government issues a call for proposals for a five-year project to coordinate the efforts of universities to save their collections. Scientists at German universities — which are funded by state governments, and constitutionally banned from receiving infrastructure funding from the federal government — should find short-term grants from research agencies or foundations to upgrade, restore and make their collections available. The universities themselves should then provide overheads for ensuring that the collections are looked after in the long-term, a sum that the Wissenschaftsrat says should be modest.

These recommendations did not emerge from a vacuum. In 2004, the DFG supported a five-year project to identify and catalogue collections in German universities. It identified more than a thousand, of which nearly 300 were shown to have been lost or destroyed. Herbaria that were once state-of-the-art, for example, were confined to dusty cellars or stuffy attics when classical botanics fell out of research fashion.

This DFG programme won the admiration of scientists in many countries that still have no national catalogue of the treasures hidden in their own universities and no systematic way of preparing one. The Wissenschaftsrat's initiative is now winning admiration for its long-term vision and political commitment.

There will certainly be battles to come. Simply saying that space should be made available for collections isn't helpful if there is genuinely no space to be had, for example. But the value that the Wissenschaftsrat now places on collections should make such battles easier to win. Research organizations in other countries should look to see if they could follow its lead. A collection deemed scientifically valuable doesn't need to be as peculiar as Scarpa's head to make it worth preserving, but it needs the same protections and accessibility.