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Re: [dinosaur] The name 'Ubirajara' is not available



Ronald: The name is (according to David) invalid because it was not properly registered in ZooBank. (Oculudentavis was published on paper, so it didn't need to be registered.) However, according to Mickey, Ubirajara might be valid after all.

As for the invalid names from Scientific Reports, if everyone treats them as valid, them being technically invalid might not mean much unless there's an ICZN ruling on them...but it's nice to follow the rules anyway. If ZooBank registration was mandatory even for paper publications, maybe lack of registration wouldn't be as much of a problem. <sarcasm> Another way to solve the problem would be for the ICZN to hire some nomenclature enforcement to arrest or fine people who don't follow the rules. </sarcasm>

On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 5:47 PM Mickey Mortimer <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com> wrote:
As the one who brought up Scientific Reports' common lack of any evidence of ZooBank registration, I don't think we should go THIS far in policing names' validity because it is VERY often the case that listed lsid links in papers go nowhere and the names do not show up when searched. Just as an example, I just checked Similiyanornis and Abitusavis that were described recently, and that's true for them. We would be losing a lot of names this way.

Mickey Mortimer


From: dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu <dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu> on behalf of David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2020 12:24 PM
To: dinosaur-l@usc.edu <dinosaur-l@usc.edu>
Subject: [dinosaur] The name 'Ubirajara' is not available
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Following the news that print publication of the 'Ubirajara' paper will probably be suspended, I had written a few paragraphs of enquiry into whether the 'Ubirajara' paper counts as published already â in other words, whether suspending the printing will have any effect.

Then it occurred to me to follow the LSIDs in the paper.

The LSID for 'Ubirajara' is given as urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:9467530F-3807-4B95-BCE4-28776E811182 in the paper. Searching for that, with the prefixes or not, does not produce any results on zoobank.org.

The LSID for 'U. jubatus' is given as urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:BA4771E2-F0EF-4198-BF1C-9F46E2195EA9â in the paper. Searching for that, with the prefixes or not, and with the spurious-looking quotation mark or not, does not produce any results on zoobank.org.

Searching for 'Ubirajara' turns up somebody's first name and a species named after someone with that name, but neither a genus name nor 'U. jubatus'.

Technically, none of the above matters. The ICZN doesn't require that nomenclatural acts be registered in ZooBank. It requires (Art. 8.5.3) that _the paper itself_, if its electronic version is to be considered published, be registered and contain evidence of its registration.

The paper does _not_ contain evidence of having been registered. Now, if the nomenclatural acts were registered and evidence thereof contained in the publication, I (for what that's worth) would be happy to accept that the publication fulfills Art. 8.5.3 by implication; but the acts are not in fact registered â the paper's claims that they are are false.

Just for completeness, I searched ZooBank for the title and for the DOI of the paper to see whether the paper _is_ registered. No results.

I triple-checked. The paper lists its authors as Robert S.H. Smyth, David M. Martill, Eberhard Frey, HÃctor E. Rivera-Sylva and Norbert Lenz.
"Smyth, Robert" and "Smyth, Robert S. H." have ZooBank entries (with two different LSIDs). There are no publications (or nomenclatural acts for that matter) associated with either entry.
"Martill, David M." has an entry with 10 associated publications. None of them is the 'Ubirajara' paper. (No registered nomenclatural acts are associated with this entry, but, as mentioned, that's not actually necessary.)
"Frey, Eberhard" has two entries. One is associated with one publication (which names a new species of sloth; the act is not registered). The other is empty.
"Rivera-Sylva, Hector" has two publications, which are not the 'Ubirajara' paper; "Rivera-Sylva, HÃctor E." has none. (No acts for either.)
"Lenz, Norbert" is another empty entry.

(I suspect what happened went like this: one author was charged with registering the manuscript; instead, he registered the authors â under the forms of their names as given in the manuscript, regardless of whether they already had entries under shorter versions of their names â and left it at that, registering neither the manuscript nor the nomenclatural acts.)

_Conclusion:_ Article 8.5.3 is not fulfilled. Therefore, the names 'Ubirajara' and 'U. jubatus' are not available at present â amd if the journal never prints the paper, they never will be.

"Not available", as a reminder, means that the ICZN treats the names as not existing. They do not compete for synonymy or homonymy; SMNK PAL 29241 is not currently a type specimen and could be made the type of another name in the future.