[Taxacom] new nomina nuda (was Re: e-only taxonomic publicat

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

Victor,

What you are doing is certainly a valuable and precious work. And 
also very effective. But since you have not distributed printed paper 
copies, future scientists in 100 and 200 years will very probably run 
into serious problems. This will be the time when the common 
acceptance of your procedures in your discipline will loose support. 
How can you garantee that your online service will remain working in 
eternal future? Do you have an eternal life contract with an 
internet provider? And how will you garantee that the CD-ROMs will 
remain readable in 100 years? 

You should think about how to solve this problem today, and not 
leave the problems for future generations after your death. I can 
predict that in 150 years the CD-ROMs will not be recognized as 
published work any more. 
The authors who published in your journal and trusted you would 
probably not be pleased if you would tell them that the price for 
quick publication is very probably that their names (the names of the 
authors) will once be forgotten, and that the taxonomic names of 
their new species will once in the future carry the names of other 
authors, who would be the first to have made available the taxonomic 
names on printed paper.

My recommendation is that you should invest a little time, publish 
and distribute printed paper copies from time to time, send some of 
these to a few public libraries, and take the dates of publication 
from those copies. 

Francisco



University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org