Taxacom: Dates of e-pubs ahead of print?

[Stephen Thorpe]

 Rich,So, is it to be in some sense "understood" that duplicate journal records all defer to the first archive associated with any of them, even before you get around to actually merging them? It could take years, in theory, for you to notice and merge a duplicate. Anyone trying to verify the date of availability before you merge will find no archive associated with the journal record actually used, which has not yet been merged. It will only retrospectively become available (if published online first) when the merge is actually done. I can imagine some hypothetical taxonomists trying to claim priority because the earlier name by some rival is not associated with a specified archive, even though it would gain retrospective priority after the merge. In my opinion, the archive date should be the date of the merge, not the date associated with the earliest duplicate with a specified archive, so there is some room for argument about your "most appropriate means".Cheers, Stephen
    On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 10:49:54 am NZST, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org> wrote:  
 
 > One complication here is that many people
> preregistering publications on ZooBank create a new record for the journal,
> even though one may already exist with a specified archive. If they don't specify
> an archive for the new duplicate journal record, then we have a situation where
> there is no specified archive for the journal record associated with the
> publication, but Rich Pyle can at any stage merge the duplicate record with the
> original journal record with a specified archive. I forget what the  consquences
> are of this, in terms of the date of specified archived, but it all gets a bit too
> complicated!

Stephen is correct that people sometimes create a duplicate copy of a Journal that lacks a reference to an online archive.  When such errors are discovered, they are corrected by the most appropriate means.  The way it works is that when duplicate journal records are merged, the earliest date on which one of the journals was linked to an archive is taken as the date on which the indication was made in ZooBank. The same applies to ISSN/ISBN assignment.

Not really all that complicated, actually.

Aloha,
Rich

Richard L. Pyle, PhD
Senior Curator of Ichthyology | Director of XCoRE
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, HI 96817-2704
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