A new era in zoological nomenclature and taxonomy: ICZN accepts e-publication and launches ZooBank

Abstract

In this issue of Zootaxa, we publish the amendment of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, 4^th edition (ICZN 1999) by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 2012: 1–7) to expand and refine methods of publication. This landmark publication not only defines the conditions for the validity of e-publications in zoological nomenclature and taxonomy, but also announces the formal transition of ZooBank (http://zoobank.org/) from being the prototype ICZN registry (started on 1 Jan. 2008; see Pyle et al. 2008) to the official ICZN registry. It should be noted that the original proposals for the amendment were also first published in Zootaxa (ICZN 2008), when we made a special effort to publish the paper for open access under the “Creative Commons Attribution License”^[1] (Zhang 2008). We are doing the same here for this amendment (ICZN 2012) to ensure it reaches the widest possible readership.^[1]See details http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/