Useful life of CDROM

[Gary Rosenberg]

Perhaps publication on CD-ROM is allowed in the 4th edition because the dam
has already been breached. The third edition of the ICZN allows publication
on CD-ROM, by virtue of not having anticipated the medium in order to
exclude it under Article 9. So under Article 8(ii), to be available, a
CD-ROM published before 2000 "must contain a statement by the author that
any new name or nomenclatural act within it is intended for permanent,
public, scientific record."

Given the problems of permanence, tracking versions and their dates of
publication, and ensuring that text and images appear identical to all
users, I think allowing electronic publication of taxonomic acts is
premature. Was a work published on the date stated, or did the author
forget to change the date when the last update was made? How many versions
of the CD-ROM must I wade through to find the one in which the taxonomic
act occurred?

Bieler & Petit (1990, Malacologia 32(1):131-145) provide an example in the
printed realm of the nightmares that different versions can cause
taxonomists. They found that between 1954 and 1989 at least 37 printings of
Tetsuaki's Kira's "Coloured Illustrations of the Shells of Japan" (6 of the
1st edition and 31 of the 2nd edition) and 9 printings in 3 editions of its
English language version "Shells of the Western Pacific in Color Vol. I"
were published. The printings were often incorrectly dated on the title
pages and in some cases differed in text and illustrations, without having
been distinguished as being separate editions. Forty species-group names
were made available in five different printings of the work; only five of
these names were flagged as being new taxa. About fifty names cited as
manuscript names appear in the work. Some were validated were cited or
subsequently in later printings, and others were validated by other
subsequent authors, usually inadvertently.

I fear that such morasses will become common in a world dominated by
electronic publishing. Electonic media (e.g., databases) are excellent for
tracking taxonomic actions, but not for making them. I would prefer to see
an electronic metaliterature, in which taxonomic works published on paper
can be synthesized, updated and corrected without fear of inadvertent
nomenclatural acts. This would free taxonomists from worrying about the
exact date that an electronic item was published, and dealing with multiple
incremental versions of works.

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Gary Rosenberg, Ph.D.                     rosenberg at acnatsci.org
Malacology & Invertebrate Paleontology    gopher://erato.acnatsci.org
Academy of Natural Sciences               http://www.acnatsci.org
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