It is a thorny issue, however. Note, first that the discussion is not about whether e-access to publications is good, as we all agree it is. Cross-linked references, PDFs, etc, make accessibility much better and speed up our science and are (probably) more sustainable than paper (though read about the power demands of Google and you’ll see the internet is not as footprint-free as it feels (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-part-2/)).

For those of you who think a publication with nomenclatural content should be dealt with the same way as all other scientific publications, we’d like to underscore that nomenclatural work has not only a half-life, but actually needs to be accessible in its original form essentially into perpetuity. It also needs to be certain that the archived form is has not been tampered with since the time it became ‘legitimized’. On the latter, most of us have not made the jump to e-only for our most important personal documents (our deeds, birth and marriage certificates) which all still function with hard copy as paramount. That is changing, but has not changed yet for many aspects of legal treatment. Add on the requirement for archival survival into perpetuity, and you can see why the ICZN and ICBN are still a bit squirrely about signing up for e-only validity.

The question is, should the definitive publications of nomenclatural acts be on media with untested archival qualities? Most people agree that the last edition of the Code made a mistake in presuming that CDs and DVDs would turn out to be archivally robust. They didn’t. Now we are assured by many that LOCKSS, etc, will be fine. But the jury is still out, the commentary still roles in, and the Commission still has to vote on whether the time is right for this transition.

In what way do the official records of note and the ICZN concern themselves with the future prospect of non-print publishing, availability of digital information, and the reduction of environmentally-unsound production costs (trees for paper, petroleum for plastic), while maintaining sound production media for taxonomic purposes? Information now travels further and faster by digital means than it does by paper, and hardcopy can be transfered to printing from computers by any interested individual without having to aquire the paper material. This is, in fact, how many proofs and editing editions are handled, instead of paper media. It seems only natural if publication media were to conform to the faster digital communication era, and therefore taxonomic stability conform itself in some way to this.

The power of the blog rules ok.

Yes I agree with you Cromercrox.

But who knows how Linneaus would have dealt with the Internet….

I think he would have been able to out-snark the best of them, entire clades of ugly parasites would have been filled with the names of blogospheric personalities.

“Didn’t the copies have to be ‘deposited in at least 5 major publicly accessible libraries which are identified by name in the work itself’ according to Article 8.6, though?”

No — this (Art. 8.6) only applies to publications “produced by a method that does not employ printing on paper”. As it happens, distribution of PDF files via the internet doesn’t even get this far into the Code, because they do not involve “durable” media (Art. 8.1.3). It’s also explicitly excluded by Art. 9.8.

So….if the durable media on which PLoS published the article was something other than paper (e.g., CD-ROMs, memory sticks, etc.), then they would have not only needed to distribute at least 5 copies to major libraries, but also would have needed to have identified those libraries within the publication itself (see Art. 8.6).

As it turns out, the durable media that PLoS chose in order to establish it as a Code-compliant publication was, in fact, paper — so Art. 8.6 does not apply.

While all of this business may appear unbelievably pedantic, it’s actually quite important (as Carl points out above). There aren’t many conventions in science that have remained intact and relevant and important for a quarter of a millennium. Nobody is more acutely aware of the need for the Code to accommodate modern mechanisms of information exchange among scientists than the ICZN Commissioners themselves are. But there is also an extremely important historical legacy that should not (cannot) simply be ignored.