Registration & Zoological Record

[christian thompson]

What Steve and John write is great to hear, but I wished we had heard it
years ago.
And what John doesn't know is it isn't as a "daunting task to add
these all to an official list as soon as they were received" as he thinks.

The ZOOLOGICAL RECORD is already doing and has been doing it for some
time.
Michael Dadd (the previous Editor) and his team set up the public access
(Index to Organism Names,
go to www.biosis.org) to their working database (TRITON) originally as a
demonstration
of what the Zoological Record could offer the zoological community.

So as Joan Thorne & Judith Howcroft have made clear in their message ZR has
been
and continues to be willing to serve the zoological community and will
index
what ever they receive, etc. (so long as BIOSIS support them).

And as a builder of a global species database (see the
BioSystematic Database of World Diptera at www.diptera.org under names), I
can
also attest that they are quite willing to help with other services beyond
the standard
Zoological Record. For example, for a reasonable fee they have provided us
with all the new species records for flies in digital format ready to be
upload to our
database.

So, in summary, the best current approach to solving the problem of
publication
in obscure places REMAINs the same.  Authors should make sure that the
serials
they publish in are indexed by the Zoological Record or they should send
their reprints
(or separately published book or even CD-ROMs*) to Zoological Record. And
authors
who want to know if their names are being indexed, just go to the
Zoological Record
WWW site and check them out in the Index to Organism Names.

*I should note that ZR did "index" (there were no new names on it) our
CDROM journal,
the Diptera Data Dissemination Disk (ISSN 1521-0014).



F. Christian Thompson
Systematic Entomology Lab., ARS, USDA
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D. C. 20560-0169
(202) 382-1800 voice
(202) 786-9422 FAX
cthompso at sel.barc.usda.gov
visit our Diptera site at www.diptera.org