December 30 , 2016:

by Mike Taylor

Back at the start of September, I noted that Tschopp and Mateus (2016) had published a petition to the ICZN, asking them to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the type specimen of the genus Diplodocus — a role that I argued it already fulfils in practice.

I wrote a formal comment in support of the petition, which I submitted on 7 September; and the next day I had word from the secretary of the ICZN that it had been received and would be published in the next issue of the BZN — the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature.

Since then I have had emails from a couple of different people asking me for the formal citation details of my comment, and I have made three or four separate attempts to discover whether it’s appeared in BZN yet. And I have been completely unable to find out.

First stop is the ICZN web-site’s case-finder, available in the sidebar at pages such as Cases and List of Available Names. But that doesn’t find Case 3700 (the Diplodocus case). I don’t just mean it doesn’t find my comment; it doesn’t find the case at all.

By poking around the site at random, I found this page, which has a tree-structured list of cases in its sidebar. Towards the bottom is a link to Case 3700 — hurrah! — but that link just says “BZN view could not find any content :(”

All right, then, let’s go to the ICZN’s site’s page about the Bulletin. As the page itself proudly proclaims in the sidebar, “The Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature (ISSN:0007-5167) is the official periodical of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature”. And yet the page content just says:

Bulletin

Either no literature content has been added to this site, or it has not yet been indexed. Indexing can take up to one hour, so please check back later.

So I tried a more general search for the BZN elsewhere on the Web.
There is an archive of BZN at BiotaxaNews but it contains only one issue, 72(3) of September 2015.
BioStor has archives for BZN but they stop at 2007.
The Internet Archive has some bits and pieces, but no coherent archive that I can find.

All in all, there seems to be literally no meaningful Web presence of the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature — which is the journal of record for, well, Zoological Nomenclature. If, like me, you want to discover the status of cases … well, you just can’t.

Oh, at no-one at the ICZN Twitter account is responding to my tweets. But then the most recent tweet from that account is from 15 May 2014, so it’s been dormant for more than two and a half years.

So my question is: *knock knock* is anyone home?

Here’s why this matters. It’s well established that Zoological Taxonomy is important (e.g. Vink et al. 2012) and that as a discipline it’s under threat. Now, the ICZN is the only game in town when it comes to authoritative taxonomy. It is the undisputed guardian of the zoological taxonomic record, and it’s had to weather threats to its own existence before a recent injection of funding. So it’s crucial that, as the standard bearer of its field, the ICZN does a solid, competent, professional, reliable job.

That has to start with making the journal of record available — or at least, if the Commission really really doesn’t want to go open access, making its table of contents available so people can see what’s been decided. If that’s not happening, then whatever decisions the Commission makes are the sound of a tree falling in a deserted forest.

We need the ICZN to up its game.
References
Tschopp, Emanuel, and Octávio Mateus. 2016. Case 3700: Diplodocus Marsh, 1878 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda): proposed designation of D. carnegii Hatcher, 1901 as the type species. Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 73(1):17-24.
Vink, Cor J., Pierre Paquin and Robert H. Cruickshank. 2012. Taxonomy and Irreproducible Biological Science. BioScience 62(5):451-452.