Gesendet:ÂDienstag, 21. Januar 2020 um 17:24 Uhr
Von:Â"Mickey Mortimer" <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com>
Betreff:Â[dinosaur] Validity of "Yunyangosaurus" / is Scientific Reports published physically?
> Hi all. While writing the "Yunyangosaurus" entry for The Theropod Database, I noticed Dai et al.'s (2020) paper describing it has no mention of ZooBank. ICZN Article 8.5.3. states names published electronically must "be registered in the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature (ZooBank) (see Article 78.2.4) and contain evidence in the work itself that such registration has occurred." So this obviously fails, and the name doesn't show up in ZooBank either. Normally that solves itself eventually by the physical publication of the journal volume, but "Yunyangosaurus" was described in Scientific Reports. As far as I can tell, Scientific Reports has no actual volumes, just a huge list of articles every year, which would suggest it is not physically published. Is this so? And if so, doesn't that indicate that Dai et al. 2020 will never be valid under the ICZN and that something else needs to be done by the authors to fix this?
According to its website, Scientific Reports has an online ISSN, but a paper ISSN is nowhere mentioned. This means that, as expected, it is published exclusively online, and that the name "Yunyangosaurus" is not available from the publication by Dai et al. (2020) or any other that yet exists.
"Not available" means the ICZN doesn't recognize it as even existing. It does not compete for synonymy or homonymy.
So, the ethical thing to do is to alert the authors that they need to publish a whole new paper. In that paper, they can say "Diagnosis: see Dai et al. (2020)", so the paper can be quite short, but it needs to be a whole new publication.