[Taxacom] Electronic publication

Wed Jan 11 22:23:29 CST 2017

John,
2 Jan 2017 is a date, so is Jan 2017 and so is 2017. You are correct that 2 is not a date, and neither is January, but that isn't controversial!
Stephen

--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 12/1/17, John Bain <John.Bain at scionresearch.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Electronic publication
 To: "deepreef at bishopmuseum.org" <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>, "'John Noyes'" <j.noyes at nhm.ac.uk>, "'Hinrich Kaiser'" <chalcopis at yahoo.com>, "'Scott Thomson'" <scott.thomson321 at gmail.com>
 Cc: "taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
 Received: Thursday, 12 January, 2017, 5:12 PM

 All this nomenclature
 stuff aside, a date is a date. 2 is not a date, neither is
 January or 2017. 2 Jan 2017 is a date. No question. All this
 semantic argument only brings nomenclature/taxonomy into
 disrepute. Sounds like petty point scoring. I am with John
 Noyes on this one.

 John
 Bain
 New Zealand Forest Research
 Institute
 (Trading as Scion)
 Sent on this twelve day of January 2017 - an
 indisputable date!
 Sent from Samsung
 Mobile

 -------- Original message --------
 From: Richard Pyle
 Date:12/01/2017 3:43 PM (GMT+12:00)
 To: 'John Noyes' ,'Hinrich
 Kaiser' ,'Scott Thomson'
 Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Electronic
 publication

 Hi John,

 > In the sense of what I
 was writing I meant the date (day month year) to be
 > mandatory for electronic publications.
 This would be ultimately easier than
 >
 printed versions because the publication would actually be a
 single act, i.e.
 > making the article
 available on the web. For printed stuff this is more
 difficult
 > because I do not think there
 is a single useable definition of when a work is
 > published, e.g. is it published when the
 fifth copy rolls off the printing press,
 > or when it leaves the printers, or when it
 arrives at the publishers, etc. There
 >
 are probably a myriad of ways that printed copies could be
 defined as being
 > published. Electronic
 versions can be more precise (as you stated).

 OK, I guess we'll have to
 agree to disagree here.  My read of the "date"
 requirement for electronic publications does not indicate
 that it must be a "complete date". My read of Art
 21.3, "Date incompletely specified", is that it a
 "date" (in the sense of the code) is still a
 "date", even if it is "incompletely
 specified".  As such, an incompletely specified date
 fulfills the requirement for a "date" to be
 included within electronic works.  Similarly, "Date
 incorrect" of Art 21.4 implies that an incorrectly
 stated date is still a "date" in the sense of the
 Code, so even if the "date" included in an
 electronic work is both incomplete and incorrect, it
 fulfills the requirement of Art. 8.5.2 because, by my read
 at least, both "incomplete dates" and
 "incorrect dates" are still "dates" in
 the sense of the Code.

 >
 I think you know that I agree with your model - simply
 put
 > "Registered=Available".
 However, there would still need to be a
 "published"
 > model as we would
 still have to have pointers (journal, volume, pages)  or
 > links to where nomenclatural acts occur
 and that is part of the problem
 > unless
 you mean that all that should also be included in ZooBank
 and freely
 > accessible.

 What I mean is that ALL
 information necessary to represent a nomenclatural act (new
 name or otherwise) would be included within the open-access
 registration record, and the successful completion of that
 record (by whatever requirements the community/Commission
 decides when designing it) would itself constitute the
 "work" that establishes the name/act.  MOST of
 the information included in PDF publications is NOT
 necessary to establish new names or acts.  Therefore, that
 extraneous information (usually having to do with taxonomy,
 not nomenclature) would NOT need to be included in the
 ZooBank record.

 Designing
 such a system would allow us to simultaneously raise the
 quality bar for what is required information in establishing
 a new act/name (e.g., explicit type designations,
 unambiguous timestamps, possibly peer review, possibly an
 image of the holotype, etc.) AND simultaneously eliminating
 all the mess caused by trying to pin down accurate
 information about published works.  Scientists would still
 continue to publish their taxonomic science (because they
 would need to in order to establish and maintain their
 scientific reputations, get tenure, and all the other
 reasons that scientists in all fields publish their
 research). The only difference would be the legal act of
 availability would be transferred to the registration
 record, rather than the publication (or publication +
 registration record).

 Coming back to the GenBank analogy:  to
 register a sequence in GenBank, you must provide a bunch of
 metadata along with the sequence.  That yields a GenBank
 registration number, which authors then cite within their
 publications that address the science associated with the
 sequence.  Similarly with names, all the metadata necessary
 for documenting new names and acts would be included among
 the metadata in the ZooBank registration record, which
 authors could cite within their publications that address
 the science associated with the relevant taxonomy.

 > I have always advocated
 that it should be mandatory for all
 >
 publications including nomenclatural acts to be stored on
 ZooBank as PDF's
 > (whatever) and
 freely available.

 I think
 that would be great!  And it was discussed extensively at
 the time the Amendment for electronic publications was being
 drafted.  But it was eventually abandoned as a requirement
 (at this stage) due to copyright concerns.  What I am
 saying is we should remove the "publication"
 entirely from the process for making new names and acts
 available, and the role that the publication has fulfilled
 these past 250+ years would be replaced by the registration
 entry.

 Aloha,
 Rich

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