Re: [dinosaur] "Yunyangosaurus" is not available

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

An ISSN is trivial to get; as far as I've seen, all journals published by 
predatory publishers have one. Remember that _all_ periodic publications can 
get an ISSN, not just scientific ones (however defined).

The same holds for DOIs.

> > On Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 7:07 AM Mickey Mortimer
> > <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com> wrote:
> >
> > How about taxa that were described "in legitimate journals (with an ISSN), 
> > with the best of intentions" but without a ZooBank reference, but which 
> > will eventually be published on paper, like Thanos? Are we going to 
> > recognize their online publication date (2018 in this case), or are we 
> > going to treat their publication date as their paper publication date (2020 
> > probably in this case)? It could have important ramifications for synonymy 
> > and such...

The letter of the Code is clear: Thanos fails Art. 8.5.3, therefore it is not 
yet published and not yet available. And yes, that does mean somebody could (by 
malice or amazing ignorance) preemptively/retroactively turn it into a junior 
synonym or homonym by publishing more quickly.

If I'll ever need to cite its authorship & date of publication, I'll 
mercilessly do so as "Delcourt & Vidoi Iori, 2020, in Delcourt & Vidoi Iori, 
2018" if the rules don't change.

> Gesendet:ÂSamstag, 25. Januar 2020 um 07:49 Uhr
> Von:Â"Tim Williams" <tijawi@gmail.com>
>
> Good question. Personally I'd prefer the online publication date to
establish priority - if it's the complete and final version of a
publication. More broadly, the ICZN has to adapt to the digital age,
and realize that many (most?) readers never actually see the actual
printed copy of a journal - assuming there is a printed copy. As
we've established, for some journals there is no hard copy - they are
wholly digital.
>
> Digital or electronic version is now the norm for scholarly journals,
and the ICZN seems to be stuck in the last century.

The ICZN fixed this back in 2012: online-only and online-early publications are 
now fully acceptable provided they fulfill the new Art. 8.5.3 by being 
registered in ZooBank and containing evidence of this registration.

The trouble is that almost the entire journal Scientific Reports, as well as a 
few cases elsewhere, have ignored this, and the names published that way are 
treated by the community as available anyway. Now we live in a world where 
common usage does not agree with the letter of the Code.

I currently think the easiest way to fix this for now is to leave the letter of 
the Code intact, but to put the journals Scientific Reports, Geology of the 
Intermountain West, Royal Society open science* and likely a few others on the 
Official List of Works Approved as Available for Zoological Nomenclature.

* The description of the non-dinosaur Carbonodraco, published late last year 
(doi: 10.1098/rsos.191191 ), wasn't registered. The "correction" that came out 
on Wednesday (doi: 10.1098/rsos.192198 ) is registered, but it only makes the 
names Carbonodraco and C. lundi available if we generously assume that Art. 
13.3, 16.1 and 16.4** can be fulfilled by citation the way Art. 13.1 explicitly 
can (13.1.2***). If they can't be, then the names are still unavailable. â I 
haven't searched for other names published in RSOS, but have checked one I 
happened to know: the non-dinosaur Andersonerpeton, duly registered and validly 
published by an overlapping set of authors a year earlier.

** 13.3: "every new genus-group name published after 1930 [...] must [...] be 
accompanied by the fixation of a type species in the original publication [...] 
or be expressly proposed as a new replacement name (nomen novum)"; 16.1: "All 
names: intention of authors to establish new nominal taxa to be explicit"; 
16.4: "Species-group names: fixation of name-bearing types to be explicit".

*** "To be available, every new name published after 1930 must [...; 13.1.1] or 
[...] be accompanied by a bibliographic reference to such a published 
statement, even if the statement is contained in a work published before 1758, 
or in one that is not consistently binominal, or in one that has been 
suppressed by the Commission (unless the Commission has ruled that the work is 
to be treated as not having been published [...]), or [13.3.3]."

> We certainly have
> to be wary of on-line "publishing" by rogue taxonomists as a way of
> bypassing peer review. Unfortunately, the ICZN has a history of being
> tolerant of rogue taxonomists who publish in self-published printed
> 'journals', so I'd say the ICZN needs to be more pro-active in this
> regard across all media.

How, though? The only idea I can come up with is that the ICZN could require 
peer review for availability from some future date onwards (as the PhyloCode 
will do, BTW). But peer review is a bit hard to define, a bit hard to prove the 
presence or absence of, and it can be rigged (keyword "peer-review ring": 
authors, editors and reviewers are all buddies who make sure nobody else can 
interfere with publication), let alone fail for innocent reasons (we've all 
seen this happen); maybe the ICZN has been letting the perfect be the enemy of 
the good and therefore still hasn't adopted this criterion.

Historically, nothing distinguishes a rogue taxonomist from Linnaeus. The Code 
is about nomenclature, not about science, so the quality of science is at best 
awkward to use as a criterion for what makes a name available. Similarly, it's 
obvious why the code of ethics at the back of the ICZN is just a list of 
Recommendations and not of Articles: it is bound to run into edge cases where 
situations look fishy but nothing can be demonstrated.