Taxacom: Dates of e-pubs ahead of print?

Tue Sep 6 02:53:43 CDT 2022

> 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?

That would be my interpretation, yes. The good news is that duplicate journal records get discovered pretty often, so it’s unlikely this problem would extend for “years”.

Incidentally, in my hideously long post yesterday, I alluded to some issues with ZooBank that don’t seem to be addressed much, in part because they are not obvious or visible (to most users).  I reckon that the issue of duplicate records is near the top of that list.  Indeed, a fair number of the emails I receive concerning ZooBank (~10/day on average) are to report duplicate records.  I also routinely discover and correct them whenever I use ZooBank myself.  The vast majority of them are duplicates of authors, so they don’t really have much impact.  The vast majority of duplicates involving published works involve at least one of them (often both) being records indicated as “In Press”, and therefore not visible to the public anyway.  Many involve duplicate registrations of names, which of course have no actual Code relevance.  Only a small number of them involve duplicate journals, and as noted above, those are usually discovered pretty quickly.  I also routinely “sweep” for duplicate journal entries for the most prolific (ZooBank-wise) journals (just did another sweep today). I also wrote some code today to discover duplicate journals via matching ISSNs (that will take me some time to process). But the point is, we’re pretty good and discovering and resolving duplicate journals.

Fun facts:

Of the nearly 11,000 Journals registered in ZooBank, 887 of them have at least one duplicate.  The top-5 duplicated journals are:

Zootaxa (62 duplicates)

Public Library of Science (44 duplicates)

The Coleopterists Bulletin (31 duplicates)

PeerJ (21 duplicates)

Journal of Natural History (20 duplicates)

> It will only retrospectively become available (if published online first) when the merge is actually done.

That’s not how I interpret it. I would say it actually becomes available when it becomes available.  It’s just not *recognizable* as available within ZooBank until the duplicates are merged.  Sort of like a PDF that lacks evidence of registration is not *recognizable* as available if it’s not known whether a paper-printed edition was published in compliance with the Code.

In an ideal would, there would be no gap between the records in ZooBank representing published works, and the records in ZooBank recognizable as such.  Of course, in an ideal world we’d also have sufficient funding to hire a professional developer to close that gap. Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world.

> 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

My opinion is not the same as yours.

> so there is some room for argument about your "most appropriate means".

Indeed!  As should be evident from this and other email forums, there’s no shortage of aspects of the code for which there is some room for argument!

Aloha,

Rich

Richard L. Pyle, PhD
Senior Curator of Ichthyology | Director of XCoRE

Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum

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Office: (808) 848-4115;  Fax: (808) 847-8252

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From: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> 
Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2022 4:18 PM
To: taxacom at lists.ku.edu; 'Paul van Rijckevorsel' <dipteryx at freeler.nl>; Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
Subject: Re: Taxacom: Dates of e-pubs ahead of print?

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 <mailto: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

Office: (808) 848-4115;  Fax: (808) 847-8252

eMail: deepreef at bishopmuseum.org <mailto:deepreef at bishopmuseum.org> 

BishopMuseum.org

Our Mission: Bishop Museum inspires our community and visitors through the exploration and celebration of the extraordinary history, culture, and environment of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.