Happy Birthday to Zoo

Online Zootaxa journal's first twenty years cause for celebration

There is no shortage of bad news about the state of taxonomy. Its disappearance from textbooks, curricula and graduate programs.  The pitifully few jobs that support taxonomists to do taxonomy as their primary research effort.  The failure of museums to grow collections in proportion to raging extinction rates.  The paucity of grants for monographs and inventories, and the reprehensible lack of respect shown to descriptive, morphology-based studies.

So, where there is good news, it deserves celebration.  In 2021, in recognition of the 20th anniversary of the online journal Zootaxa, its editor summarized the impressive impact that it has had on animal taxonomy.  Between 2001 and 2020, Zootaxa published 29,400 papers.  These were written by more than 28,000 authors and added up to 585,000 pages.  Of these 1,499 were monographs 60 pages or more in length.

These publications included 60,470 species or subspecies new to science.  I will save what I think of subspecies for another day, but let’s not detract from this milestone.  Among these new species were more than 4000 new genera, more than 150 new tribes, more than 200 new subfamilies, and 170 new families.  There were also nearly a thousand additional new names created.  And, no less importantly, there were 12,684 new synonyms.  These, of course, represent hypotheses of species status that were falsified, bringing new accuracy to animal nomenclature.

In the fifteen years following 2005, Zootaxa accounted for 26.6% of the new species recorded in Zoological Record.  For a single journal that is a staggering impact.

The 28,000 authors behind this monumental assemblage of knowledge represented 131 countries. One reason for the success of Zootaxa is that authors may publish papers with no cost.  Taxonomic papers are often longer than other scientific publications and normal page charges can be prohibitive, especially for monographs and revisions.  The downside, however, is that only authors who can afford page charges are able to publish their papers as open-access titles.  This is a side effect of what has been a very successful business model.

Zootaxa is an inspiring pioneer in zoological taxonomy, a journal that dares to question and go against a trend shying away from publishing descriptive taxonomy.  And, it has inspired others to follow, such as Phytotaxa and ZooKeys. 

While such journals deserve enormous praise for their vision and achievements, the taxonomic community still has work to do.  The International Code governing scientific names in zoology does not yet require that nomenclatural acts, including newly named species, be registered in ZooBank before being recognized.  Without mandatory registration, it still takes too long before all new species in a given year are readily available.  Registration, of course, should include no censorship, simply assurance the rules have been followed. 

Going one step farther, there are systematists who for years have championed making all taxonomic descriptions open access.  I agree with them that species descriptions should belong to the world’s science community and it should not be possible to hide them behind a copyright wall.  Journals could still copyright interpretive and analytical aspects of taxonomic papers while making descriptions themselves openly available.  It is in the interest of everyone that such minimal descriptive information be available to all, especially in the middle of a biodiversity crisis.

One last thought is that taxonomists always get the short end of the stick when it comes to citation indices.  These indices keep track of how many people cite a particular publication.  The latest molecular technique, basically a how-to guide, may get thousands of citations before it is overtaken by the next technique. In contrast, a superb monograph is written off as having less value because of it has a narrow focus and therefore few immediate citations, yet it will remain useful for generations.  It would be easy and ethical for online biology journals to track the use of scientific names and give credit to the taxonomists who created them.

As we confront the biodiversity crisis and a high rate of species extinction, Zootaxa is an encouraging success story. The time to document earth’s species is growing short so the importance of the Zootaxa mission could not be greater.  So, Happy Birthday Zootaxa, with many more to come.