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

[Stephen Thorpe]

Tony, I’m not sure we live in the same “real world”, but, for me, what is important is to have a unique binomial for a given species (unique in the sense Th it only applies to one species, while that species may have several alternative binomials). Authorship and date are minor details, not to be bothered about most of the time. As an example, the binomial Homo sapiens is rarely fully cited with author or date, because there would be no point!
Stephen 

Sent from my iPhone

> On 28/03/2023, at 7:12 AM, Tony Rees via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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
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