[Taxacom] Honest question

[Doug Yanega]

Briefly, speaking as an ICZN Commissioner:

A few years ago, Commissioner Mark Harvey and I solicited public feedback (including right here on Taxacom) on whether or not taxonomists felt that unethical practices by taxonomists were something the ICZN should address formally. For example, whether violations of the ICZN's Code of Ethics - Appendix A of the Code - could be taken as grounds to declare an author's work(s) unavailable. Somewhat to our surprise, we had very few people respond that they supported this idea.

Perhaps people who have never crossed paths with unethical taxonomists don't believe it's a problem. Perhaps people acknowledge that it's a problem, but feel that it's not the ICZN's business to interfere. Perhaps people did support the idea, but didn't bother to respond to our solicitation.

Whatever the reason for so few responses, the bottom line is that we on the Commission will generally only take action, and implement changes to the Code, when we receive a clear message from the community that such action needs to be taken. Despite claims some may make to the contrary, we are not dictators or autocrats, we are representatives (elected representatives, believe it or not) who try to act on behalf of our colleagues, and we take their concerns very seriously. We are open to suggestions, we are open to petitions, but we also want to be certain that far-reaching requests have broad support within the community.

It is also important that any petitions be phrased objectively, and crafted carefully, so the implementation and consequences are straightforward. Based on your comments, you object to taxonomy that side-steps the peer review process, and that's the most common and universal complaint we hear. People have had ideas about this in the past, and I can briefly review 3 such examples: (1) If we draft a Code Article that prohibits publication without peer review, then all a self-published "journal" producer has to do is claim that they have peer review; there is no way to ever reliably determine if such claims are true, so an Article like this would accomplish nothing. (2) If we draft a Code Article that proposes an explicit "white list" of acceptable journals, that might indeed be harder to circumvent, but it raises the issue of who decides what is or is not acceptable, who decides when a journal is added to (or removed from) the list, who maintains the list, or how anyone is supposed to know in year X whether a name published 10 or 20 years earlier was on the white list at that time (among other issues). (3) If we draft a Code Article that proposes all new descriptions must be published in a single refereed venue, then we not only run into problems with finding referees for multiple languages, but everyone whose tenure review rests upon their work being published in Nature and Science and other high-IF journals would suffer (unless we could come up with a new methodology for the citation of taxonomic work that would ensure that an all-descriptive-taxonomy journal actually *had* a high IF, but that would require a change in the social engineering of science itself).

There have been other ideas and proposals, but each of them has pros and cons, advocates and detractors. For example, I've long advocated that we expand and streamline the LAN mechanism in the Code (Article 79), which allows bodies of taxonomic experts to collectively decide which names in their discipline they want to treat as available (allowing them to discard names selectively if they feel it necessary), but that idea has also met with resistance. I think it has numerous advantages over other proposals, but I've been talking about it for over 20 years, and have made few converts. I doubt we can find a process that everyone will like.

Please don't think that we on the Commission are unaware of the problems and concerns facing the community. But we need well-reasoned input, ideas, and feedback if people want us to make changes to how we do things. Otherwise, realistically, any approaches people might devise to address these issues are going to need to be organized and implemented within the taxonomic community itself, rather than with the ICZN.

Sincerely,

--
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
             http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82