one vs. many journals (Re: Response from NATURE)

[Curtis Clark]

At 14:36 2002-06-14, Doug Yanega wrote:
>What do you see as the overwhelming advantage to having taxonomic
>publications scattered throughout several hundred journals that leads
>you to prefer this over  having everything published in one central,
>universally-accessible place?

Hold on, Doug--I thought your original suggestion had to do with
nomenclature. I'm perfectly fine with a central repository for nomenclature
("protologues", as we say in botany; everything connected with the original
publication), but centralizing taxonomy seems wholly inappropriate and
unworkable. Sure, the genomics folks put all their sequences in GenBank,
but they aren't all forced to publish in a single journal. I'm not sure
what *wouldn't* be accomplished by code-mandated registration with a
publicly accessible database of protologues.




--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department            Voice: +1 909 869 4062
California State Polytechnic University     FAX: +1 909 869 4078
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