Abstract
For 250 years, taxonomists have relied on having access to physical copies of published works in order to verify information about taxa. The difficulty of tracking down publications can be a substantial impediment to taxonomic work, which has led some researchers to advocate modifying the codes of nomenclature, for plants and bacteria as well as for animals, to allow electronic publication of scientific names (Knapp et al. 2007, Wheeler & Krell 2007).
References
Anonymous. (2001) The future of the electronic scientific literature. Nature, 413, 1, 3.
Fenton, E. (2006) Preserving electronic scholarly journals: Portico. Ariadne, 47.
Available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/fenton/ (accessed 29 September 2008).
Howe, D., Costanzo, M., Fey, P., Gojobori, T., Hannick, L., Hide, W., Hill, D.P., Kania, R. Schaeffer, M., St Pierre, S., Twigger, S., White, O. & Rhee, S.Y. (2008) The future of biocuration. Nature, 455, 47–50.
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (1999) International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, London, xxix + 306 pp.
Knapp, S., Polaszek, A. & Watson, M. (2007) Spreading the word. Nature, 446, 261–262.
Maniatis, P., Roussopoulos, M., Giuli, T.J., Rosenthal, D.S.H. & Baker, M. (2005) The LOCKSS Peer-to-Peer Digital Preservation System. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 23, 2–50.
Available from http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mema/publications/TOCS2005.pdf (accessed 29 September 2008).
McNeill, J. (2006) XVII International Botanical Congress: Summary report of the actions of the nomenclatural section of the Congress – Vienna, Austria 12–16 July, 2005. Botanical Electronic News, 356.
Available from http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ben356.html#3 (accessed 29 September 2008).
Polaszek, A. et al. (2005) A universal register for animal names. Nature, 437, 477.
Ride, W.D.L. (1999) Introduction. In: International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, London, pp. xix–xxix.
Ride, W.D.L. (2003) The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, 4th edition - what next? In: Legakis, A., Sfenthourakis, S., Polymeni, R. & Thessalou-Legaki, M. (Eds.), The New Panorama of Animal Evolution: Proceedings XVIII International Congress of Zoology. Pensoft, Sofia and Moscow, pp. 673–682.
Szalay, A. (2008) Preserving digital data for the future of eScience. Science News, 174(5), 32.
Wheeler, Q.D. (Ed.) (2008) The New Taxonomy. CRC Press, New York, xi + 237 pp.
Wheeler, Q.D. & Krell, F.T. (2007) Codes must be updated so that names are known to all. Nature, 447, 142.
Zander, R.H. (2004) Report of the Special Committee on Electronic Publishing with two proposals to amend the Code. Taxon, 53, 592–594.