[Taxacom] e-only taxonomic publication is safe & accessible

[Christopher Taylor]

> As an aside, I would be very interested in any "high-profile" names you
> are aware of that weren't published on paper ...

_Science_ and other high-impact, low-pagespace journals have been guilty on
more than one occasion of banishing the descriptions of new taxa to the
online-only supplementary info. One recent example was the description by
Ren _et al._ (2009) of a number of fossil mecopteroids:

Ren, D., C. C. Labandeira, J. A. Santiago-Blay, A. Rasnitsyn, C.-K. Shih, A.
Bashkuev, M. A. V. Logan, C. L. Hotton & D. Dilcher. 2009. A probable
pollination mode before angiosperms: Eurasian, long-proboscid scorpionflies.
_Science_ 326: 840-847.

The names of the new taxa appear in the paper-published article, but the
details necessary to make them more than _nomina nuda_ (such as holotype
designation) do not.

    Cheers,

        Christopher Taylor

Christopher Taylor
Dept of Environmental Biology
Curtin University of Technology
GPO Box U1987
Perth
WA 6845
Australia
 
http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com