[Taxacom] ICZN procedure question

[Richard Pyle]

> The problem I see is much less that an electronic copy could 
> be destroyed, as it has not been a major problem for 
> taxonomic science in the past 400 years that paper is a 
> material that can very easily be destroyed. One of the major 
> problems will be developing methods to find electronic copies 
> again after long time. In many years libraries have developed 
> means to store and find printed books, and scientists took a 
> long time to learn how to cite book metadata in a way that 
> others will be able to find them in libraries. 

Fair enough -- and I think *this* is where we start to spill into what I
would agree is the real issue (as has already been pointed out by Donat):
open access of the content.

I have hinted at something that I expected to receive objection to, but so
far has not.  In case my hints were too obscure, I'll state it more
emphatically:

Almost by definition, the aspects of nomenclatural publications that give
them elevated need for long-term archival persistence (compared with other
published science) is the subset of content of such publications that render
new names to be compliant with the relevant Code.  If you have a typical
paper-published article describing a new species, and you took a yellow
highlighter pen to mark all the bits of the article that confer
code-compliancy of the new name, in most cases the yellow highlighted bits
would represent only a small fraction of the information content of the
whole article.  Everything in the article that is not highlighted is,
effectively, non-nomenclatural; and as such falls into the same category as
all other scientific publications (as I said previously, for which we do not
see passionate pleas to preserve paper printing).

Any electronic registy of names/nomenclatural acts would surely require
inclusion of all these important yellow-highlighted bits.  As such, a
print-out of the registry content would constitute the complete information
content that our community demands long-term persistence for (if we wanted
long-term persistence for the rest of the non-highlighted parts of the
article, then what we'd really saying is that we want paper publicaiton for
*all* of science).

The Bacteriological community figured this out a long time ago. As best as I
understand the bacteriological registration system (Brian, correct me if I'm
wrong), the content of the registration entry is the distillation of those
yellow-highlighted bits, published in paper form.

So, bringing home the point:  unless and until we convince the taxonomic
community to publish *all* of their Code-governed nomenclatural acts in
open-acces venues, there will always be barriers to ensuring widespread
redundancy of the complete articles.  However, if we acknowledge that the
only thing we're truly concerned about for long-term archiving is the
Code-requird bits, then we can go a long ways to solving the
problem/mitigating the concenrs if the e-registration system is open-access
and widely replicated.  And, we can go further by having numerous copies of
the registry content printed on durable media on a regular basis.

> The other problem that will arise after a file would have 
> been found, is how to read it. This is a problem the books 
> don't have, with which we have very little experience and can 
> only hope that someone will help us some day, preferrably 
> someone who will not be paid by us.

This would be a non-issue if the e-repository was the e-archive.

Aloha,
Rich