[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 09:41:11 UTC 2014

On 25 March 2014 09:20, Vladimir Blagoderov <vblago at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Douglas,
>
> As one of the authors of the publication you mentioned I must say that we
> criticised some inconsistent practices of modern methods of publication, not
> methods themselves. For example, "versioning" is completely unacceptable for
> taxonomic literature as it jeopardises stability of taxonomic names. Once
> published, the paper must remain immutable, and any errors as Mike noted
> above must be corrected in a new publication even at expence of several
> months.

I don't agree at all. The proper nomenclatural authority for a name
need not, as now, be of the form "Xenoposeidon Taylor and Naish 2007".
It can be "Xenoposeidon Taylor and Naish 2007, version 1". So long as
that version of that paper can be obtained, we have taxonomic
stability. If Darren and I subsequently revise the paper to produce a
version 2, that needn't affect the authority for the name Xenoposeidon
at all.

> It may not be ideal, but this is the rule, laid down in the codes of
> nomenclature.

The rules are our servants, not our masters. They exist for our
benefit, not us for theirs. They can be changed when changing
circumstances mean they no longer serve us, as happened with the
recent electronic-publication amendment. There is no reason why the
ICZN/ICBN rules shouldn't similarly be amended to take account of
versions.

Self-referential example: see this version of Wikipedia's page on the
ICZN, from 5 July 2012 (before the electronic-publication amendment):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature&oldid=500828278

It's ridiculous that upstart organisation like Wikipedia are running
rings around us as a scholarly community. We should be the ones
pioneering new and more powerful approaches, not trailing reluctantly
along behind Wikipedia.

-- Mike.