Taxacom: Clarification RE e-publication (zoology) - new name has ZooBank LSID (or doesn't), publication does

[Tony Rees]

Just to bring this discussion back to "why do we care" about these things -
a real world use case may be instructive:

- currently "we" i.e. the broader group of users and creators of biology
data, biodiversity informatics community in particular, need some sort of
reproducible "universal handles" (normally as text strings) that uniquely
identify a taxon, distinguish it from other similarly named taxa, are
verifiable from the primary literature, and are in wide circulation
(normally this excludes cryptic and/or non alphabetic internal identifiers
from the databases that we may curate)

- the combination of taxon name + authority + year generally suffices in
zoology, for this purpose (with a very small number of exceptions) -
allowing for some creative "relaxed matching" e.g. treating "Stroiński"
(with diacritic" the same as "Stroinski" (without diacritic), treating "Liu
et al." the same as "Liu, Shao, Zhang, Wang, Zhang, Chen, Liang & Xue", and
so on. (Same for some Spanish language author surnames which may
alternately be cited as one or 2 words)

- therefore, getting the year correct is important - e.g., is "Poinar, Vega
& Stroiński, 2020" (IRMNG, up to today) the same authority (i.e. published
work) as "Poinar, Vega & Stroinski 2021" (ION/Zoological Record) or
different, in effect meaning are we dealing with a single taxon (or taxon
description) or more than one.

Looking at a number of these "minor" date discrepancies, as I am at the
moment, most of them arise from works that were officially published (year
on journal issue cover) in one year (2021 in this case, for the genus
Jatoba Poinar, Vega & Stroiński) but e-published towards the end of the
preceding year (2020 in this example). Hence the effort needed to determine
whether the e-published version of the name is available or not, and
therefore which cited instance is correct. From my efforts thus far, in a
subset of such IRMNG records, the IRMNG date (entered e.g. from an online
version available via Google Scholar, Sci-Hub or elsewhere) turns out to be
invalid i.e the ICZN criteria for e-publication (as now understood, thanks)
are not fulfilled, while for a larger subset they apparently are fulfilled,
thus the ION/Zoological Record entry is in error (although there is not
much that I can do about that apart from note the discrepancy). In any
case, all hinges on the "criteria for effective e-publication" can be
correctly described and interpreted, for each case, in other words, the
subject of this thread.

So this is just the real world context, and thanks all for your
consideration.

Regards - Tony