[Zoobank-list] Registration

[John Noyes]

Dear All,

Basically I am all for an official register of names, but I have some comments below. I tried to keep this comment succinct, but failed miserably!

Doug (and others) we must, must keep this discussion to registering names only. Although I have some sympathy with what you say about on-line publishing, etc., if we go along your ("Yanegian") route we shall never get registration off the ground. It will be difficult enough to impose mandatory registration.

My thoughts:

In the statement (#4) below we are told that providing an electronic copy of the publication is NOT MANDATORY in order to make a name available.

"4. After publication, and if available, the author will upload a facsimile file (currently pdf), or submit a reprint or good quality photocopy to the Commission Secretariat, for verification and archiving. Alternatively, the author can provide the registration details by post on a form downloadable from the ICZN website or available from the ICZN Secretariat. These electronic documents, although ***not mandatory***, will become an integral part of ZooBank, and authors, editors and publishers will be strongly encouraged to supply them during the registration process. Copyright issues will need to be negotiated between publishers and ICZN."

Yet the paragraph (#5) below seems to infer that it is mandatory in order for the CS to cross-check the nomenclatural act. What happens if someone proposes a new name in a publication, completes the necessary form on the ICZN website, yet does not send a copy of the publication. Is the onus on the CS to obtain a copy of the publication or for the author to send it?

"5 . When the Commission Secretariat has received a copy of the original description or published nomenclatural act, this will be cross-checked with the registration form, checked for Code-compliance, and finally registered. In cases of non Code-compliance, the Commission will contact the author and withhold the registration process until a correction is published."

Who will be responsible for linking the original description (paragraph #7) to the registered name in the database? The author or the CS? With more than 15,000 new taxonomic names proposed every year this would be a gargantuan effort for anyone. It will be bad enough corss checking information to ensure that a name is available.

7. Copyright issues allowing, the complete original description will be linked to the registered name in the database immediately, and a paper copy archived in the archive of the Commission.

Sorry, this is getting longer than I intended, but finally I think it may be a good idea to have "an official list of specialist taxonomic web sites" - not more than one per taxonomic group. A name appearing on the "Official Site" as available would also be considered "Officially Available" even if it did not appear on the ICZN database. My rationale for is as follows: If someone keeps an on-line, up-to-date specialist database of a particular group (in my case Chalcidoidea) they are not going to check every name with the ICZN database to see if that name has become "officially" available. If the new names meet the minimum conditions of the code to make it available then that name will be entered in the specialist database as an available name. It would be too much to expect the owner of that specialist database to check every new name or nomenclatural act that is proposed against the ICZN database. In some cases it might be necessary to check a particular name on dozens of occasions over a period of time to see if it has been added to the ICZN database. It would also be unreasonable to expect the owner of the database to inform CS that certain available names are missing from the database or even that specific publications have not been noted by the ICZN. This could lead to confusion because a name acknowledged as available in the specialist database may, in some circumstances, not be "officially" available because for whatever reason it has not been added to the Official List of Names on the ICZN web site. It is possible that non-taxonomists could use a name in piblications that is treated as available in the specialist database but that is "officially" unavailable. My guess is that non-taxonomists would check a name only in the specialist database and not the official ICZN database. Just a thought.

Finally, I implore the secretariat of ICZN to keep the eventual rules for registration as simple as possible (half a page of A4 would be about right). The current code of zoological nomenclature is far too complex and to add another 5 or 10 pages to this to cover mandatory registration might make it too inaccessible and confusing.

John

Department of Entomology,
The Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road,
South Kensington,
London SW7 5BD
Tel.: +44 (0)207 942 5594    Fax.: +44 (0)207 942 5229

Universal Chalcidoidea Database (everything you wanted to know about chalcidoids and more):
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/entomology/chalcidoids

Message regarding the Entomology Department move to temporary accommodation 2005
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/entomology/move.html

Interactive catalogue and biological database of World Chalcidoidea on CD:
Contact the publisher: DickyS._Yu at telus.net, or Dicky S. Yu, P.O.Box 48205,
Bentall Centre, Vancouver B.C., V7X 1N8, CANADA;
see also www.taxapad.com