[N]early 250 years after Carl von Linné, a Swedish naturalist, invented the modern system of naming living creatures, taxonomists still have no official list of all the animals discovered so far. This makes the work of biologists, ecologists and conservationists --who rely on species names to know just what it is they are studying and conserving-- more difficult than it need be. Linnaeus, to give his familiar, Latinised name, introduced the system of binomial nomenclature in 1758 by classifying more than 10,000 species of animals and plants with two-part names, also Latinised, such as Homo sapiens. But so many species since then have been named in such a haphazard way that animal nomenclature is in trouble. Although Linnaeus's big idea was that each species would have one scientific name, so that scientists could know immediately what they were discussing, the lack of a single official “telephone directory” has frustrated the entire enterprise. Around 1.5m species are thought to have been described so far, but more than 6m names have been used....The result is that taxonomists must struggle long and hard to figure out whether a name has been used before and also what other, similar, animals look like. In entomology alone, relevant data may be found in any one of more than 1,000 specialised journals. No wonder such a large proportion of the world's museum specimens are labelled incorrectly. The solution, proposed by a group called the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), based at the Natural History Museum, is called ZooBank....Exactly how ZooBank would work is still under discussion. When Andrew Polaszek, the executive secretary of the ICZN, proposed the idea, it was as much a call for proposals as a blueprint. But the non-negotiable core is for an open-access, web-based system that would set out to be definitive. Anything that does not appear would be an un-species as far as taxonomy is concerned.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2006 03:36:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
