[Zoobank-list] original descriptions

[Doug Yanega]

Frank Krell wrote:

>Copyright laws will prevent us from just uploading pdfs of papers 
>containing descriptions into the online database. (Moreover, even 
>without copyright problems this would require massive additional 
>funding). However, we would like to pursue this idea as far as 
>ZooBank is allowed to. Blackwell Publishing agreed to let us put 
>online the original descriptions (not the complete paper) from their 
>journals (as long as the scientific societies involved agree; the 
>Royal Entomological Society did already). There are thousands of 
>copyright owners around the globe. Copyright is a massive legal 
>problem for making publicly available all original descriptions 
>which will arrive in the office of ICZN. We have to discuss this 
>problem very carefully and would need international legal advice if 
>we want to find a solution without setting the professional 
>publishing world against ZooBank.

and, in writing this, Frank has succinctly presented another VERY 
strong point in favor of the "publication = registration" approach I 
proposed: no concerns over copyright, ever, since no outside journals 
would be involved. The "professional publishing world" would never 
again interfere with our science.

While I'm here, I'd like to briefly respond to a few other points 
that Frank made in an earlier posting (Rich Pyle has already 
responded to one such point)

>1. It would mean that the ICZN deals with the science itself, not 
>only with nomenclature. We would then have the same muddle as in the 
>PhyloCode.

The "muddle" in Phylocode is not because they decided to include peer 
review as a criterion, but that they included it in a manner that is 
inefficient. We would not have to follow in their footsteps. The idea 
is called "building a better mousetrap".

>3. Scientists are still assessed by their list of publications, and 
>I see no signs that this will change very soon. If we strip 
>taxonomists of their descriptive papers because everything has to be 
>published in ZooBank, they will get even worse assessments.

This conjecture is, I think, quite short-sighted: (1) please recall 
that what I proposed is NOT that descriptive papers won't be 
published (so no one will get "stripped" of anything), but rather 
that they will all be published in one place, under our collective 
editorial control (2) if a new online/print hybrid journal appears 
which gets more visits and citations than any other online journal 
besides "Science" and "Nature", it will have MORE prestige than any 
other conventional taxonomic journal in history. Zootaxa is *already* 
showing signs of having such stature - for that matter, why couldn't 
we simply team up *explicitly* with Zootaxa? Again, the proposal is 
that EVERY taxonomist in the world will have to publish ALL of their 
descriptions via that one venue. A single journal that contains each 
and every one of the 20,000 new zoological revisions coming out each 
year will quickly earn a high "impact rating" and do just as much, if 
not more, to advance the careers of the taxonomists publishing in it 
as any journal they could publish in today. The ONLY taxonomists who 
might suffer a loss of prestige would be the vertebrate 
palaeontologists, because Science and Nature would no longer be open 
to them. But how many new taxa are described in those two journals 
every year, after all? Fewer than 50 out of over 20K taxa? Since over 
99% of the biodiversity that remains to be described is composed of 
*living* taxa, I don't see why worries over whether paleontologists 
can continue to publish in Science and Nature should be an issue when 
we're discussing the fate of _all taxonomy_.

>Non-journal-based taxonomy is yet to be the common working practice 
>and not rewarded in CVs

I am not and never have been talking about "non-journal-based" 
taxonomy; Zootaxa *is* a journal. Why not make it the ONLY journal? 
Basically all we'd have to do to go from the status quo to the 
dreaded "Yanega Scenario" is make the review process for Zootaxa open 
and web-based (with automated reviewer alerts), and make publication 
in Zootaxa the _sine qua non_ for name availability AND registration. 
Teaming with Zootaxa would spare us having to reinvent the wheel.

On similar lines, it's nice that Scott Federhen is here, so I can 
raise another issue which I have explicitly suggested in the past: 
what are the possibilities that the ZooBank registry of names could 
link *directly* to GenBank? I don't mean just in terms of data 
linkage, but actual infrastructure. One of THE main arguments we've 
all heard, repeatedly, from those who reject the idea of a registry 
of names and/or online publishing of taxonomy is that they won't 
support the venture because they're convinced that the website will 
crash, shut down, become obsolete, etc., and/or that the electronic 
archives will vanish like the infamous "reel-to-reel tape data 
stores" (i.e., we won't have the resources to move the data to newer 
storage media). GenBank, on the other hand, occupies an almost 
unprecendented position in the history of scientific data archives 
because - by its very nature (being an effectively centralized 
repository for the collective work of thousands of scientists, and 
essential to future of the scientific community, while simultaneously 
mirrored in many places) - it is the closest thing one can conceive 
of to a digital archive with *guaranteed* perpetuity (basically, 
until and unless Human Civilization Itself collapses into ruin, 
GenBank will be maintained, because too much has already been 
invested in it, and depends upon it).
GenBank cannot and will not be allowed to become obsolete, or crash, 
or suffer any of these horrific fates that the naysayers feel are 
*inevitable* for any fundamentally digital effort like ZooBank. Thus, 
it seems to me that if ZooBank could *literally* join with GenBank, 
we'd be able to forever silence the scare-mongers, by being able to 
promise that ZooBank would also exist in guaranteed perpetuity. I'm 
just brainstorming here, obviously, but it can't hurt to ask - I 
think that anything we can do, including potential strategic 
alliances, to help the ZooBank initiative succeed, is worth 
discussing at this stage. There are still many alternatives open to 
us.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0314
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82