Taxacom: Dates of e-pubs ahead of print?

[Adam Cotton]

On 04/09/2022 07:34, Richard Pyle via Taxacom wrote:
> <snip>
> 3) Any name or nomenclatural act appearing in an electronic document can only be made available if the requirements of Art. 8 are fulfilled, and none of the provisions of Art. 9 apply.  The requirements specific to electronic works include:
> 	<snip>
> 	c) The work itself must contain evidence of registration. Examples of evidence include the registration number of the work, or the exact date of registration of the work, the registration number of a name within the registered work, and perhaps other things as well. The registration of an Author of the work does not count as evidence.  The evidence may be formatted in a way that is visible to humans in the electronic document, or it may be embedded in some non-visible way (e.g., in the electronic document metadata, or as an embedded hyperlink within the electronic document). (Art. 8.5.3)
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Firstly I would like to say thank you to Richard for putting all of this 
down for everyone to read instead of sleeping (mind you Richard may be a 
late sleeper like me).

One point that I think needs to be addressed in the 5th edition of the 
Code is that brought up in 3c) above:
>   The evidence may be formatted in a way that is visible to humans in the electronic document, or it may be embedded in some non-visible way
In my opinion the evidence should HAVE TO be 'formatted in a way that is 
visible to humans in the electronic document' otherwise it is very 
difficult for a real person to look at a pdf and be confident that it 
conforms to the Code requirements of e-publication.

It is not difficult for a Zoobank registration 'string' to be included 
in the text of the publication, and indeed most publications do include 
this now. If this is not included most readers conversant with the Code 
(mainly taxonomists, I guess) will conclude that either it is a pdf copy 
of a paper originally published on paper or it is not validly published 
according to the Code.

I suspect that registration on Zoobank will be included as a publication 
requirement in the 5th edition, as has been hinted at previously. If so 
it would be helpful to humans if the evidence of registration is visible 
to humans too. That would remove any question of Code compliance and 
save the time needed to check in Zoobank whether registration had taken 
place in order to confirm the availability of a name or names in the 
publication.

Adam.