Problems with the availability of zoological nomenclatural acts published online: the case of the Journal of Herpetology

Abstract

In September 2012, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature was amended in order to allow the online publication of new nomina and nomenclatural acts, provided some conditions are respected. One of them is that such electronic publications be pre- and postregistered in the database Zoobank, and that this registration be mentioned in their PDFs. Unfortunately, these requirements were ignored by part of the international community of zootaxonomists and of publishers. Here we draw the attention to the fact that the famous Journal of Herpetology, which has been published only online since 2021, has since then not respected them in most (10 out of 13) of its taxonomic papers including nomenclatural novelties, thus failing to provide nomenclatural availability to them.