The process of indexing nomenclatural acts from published literature has a long tradition, in some cases dating as far back as the middle of 19^th century for different taxonomic groups. As a result there are several nomenclatural indexes that aim to be comprehensive for their focal taxa, for example, Index Kewensis in botany, Index Fungorum or MycoBank in mycology, and Zoological Record and Index Animalium in zoology. Sherborn’s effort in Index Animalium surely stands as the giant among these efforts due to the sheer scale of described animal diversity (Evenhuis 2016; Miller 2016; Taylor 2016; Dickinson 2016; Pilsk et al. 2016; Welter-Schultes et al. 2016). Taxonomists use these indexes to trace nomenclatural acts through the literature and to help ensure they have considered relevant published works. They can also, along with a far broader audience, use them as an authoritative source of information including the correct spelling and authorship of the name. This improves information retrieval and fidelity (Lyal 2016; Page 2016; Pyle 2016). Increasingly these indexes are being used as the basis for a Global Names Architecture (www.globalnames.org, Patterson et al. 2010). Names from these indexes are either used directly in, or could be linked to, almost all information resources which contain information about organisms. Names also form the foundation for taxonomic concepts, which could be considered as a set of related names. Thus, these indexes occupy a vital role in connecting the occurrence of names in literature and diverse information systems with differing taxonomic concepts (Patterson et al. 2010).

Historically, these indexes have been compiled by a team of editors scanning the relevant literature. This is an inefficient process. The lists become outdated even as they are being produced, because newly described taxa are continually being added to the list. However, the increase in electronic publication of nomenclatural acts made possible by recent changes to the nomenclatural codes in zoology (ICZN 2012) and botany (Knapp et al. 2011, ICNafp 2012) provides an opportunity to reduce the time spent by index editors on keying information already processed by the author and publisher. By reducing the scanning times and manual compilation, index editors would be freed to spend more time ensuring the data quality of the index, facilitating greater linkages with other information resources. Therefore, the indexes should switch focus from post-publication indexing to pre-publication registration.

Electronic registration of nomenclatural acts in trusted online registries would have the advantage of ensuring nomenclatural novelties published according to the relevant code would be broadly disseminated and available for linkage into other systems. Registration needs to be developed in accordance with the revisions of the biological codes of nomenclature to make the most efficient use of developing web technologies. Mandatory registration would ensure that all new nomenclatural acts governed under the code were captured and treated consistently (Polaszek et al. 2005). However, if such a system were to be open, and work with broadly agreed standards, it could also open up the indexing and registration process to a broader range of actors, thus improving the scope and speed of data capture within the indexes, the linkage between indexes, and facilitating the creation of new indexes or registries which could complement or cover gaps between existing resources.

This paper deals with a specific and important part of the registration process, namely a common model for an automated, prior to publication, machine-to-machine, XML-based registration and associated workflow between publishers and indexes who could act as registries in further streamlining the process of registration and making it cost efficient.

There are several ways as to how registration (or indexing if registration is not yet mandated by the relevant code) can be best implemented. Different options and the relationship to the publication process have been extensively reviewed by Pyle and Michel (2008) and Morris et al. (2011). The concept of an automated registration model was first presented by several of the authors of this article at the Sherborn meeting in London in October 2011 and at the Biosystematics 2013 Conference in Vienna, in February 2013, with an expansion at the Digital Nomenclature Workshop in London in January 2015.

Despite the visible progress in recent years, four major questions remain to be answered:

The International Botanical Congress in Melbourne in July 2011 had a major impact on streamlining the process by amending the

International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants

Shortly thereafter, The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature voted in favour of a revised version of the amendment to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature that was first proposed in 2008. The purpose of the amendment is to expand and refine the methods of publication allowed by the Code, particularly in relation to electronic publication. The amendment establishes an Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature (with ZooBank as its online version), allows electronic publication after 2011 under certain conditions, and disallows publication on optical discs after 2012. The requirements for electronic publications are that the work be registered in ZooBank before it is published, that the work itself states the date of publication and contains evidence that registration has occurred, and that the ZooBank registration states both the name of an electronic archive intended to preserve the work and the ISSN or ISBN associated with the work. Registration of new scientific names and nomenclatural acts is not required. The Commission confirmed that ZooBank was ready to handle the requirements of the amendment [International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) 2012].

The current situation with indexing and registration in the three domains of eukaryotic organisms can be summarized as follows:

FUNGI

PLANTS

ANIMALS

Registration of many new nomenclatural acts might be a tedious and extremely time-consuming process if done “by hand”, especially in the recently introduced but increasingly submitted “turbo-taxonomic” papers, combining molecular data, concise morphological descriptions and digital imaging (Butcher et al. 2012, Riedel et al. 2013). The numbers of new taxa described in such papers may count in hundreds, for example 178 new species of parasitic wasps (Butcher et al. 2012) and 101 new species of Trigonopterus weevils (Riedel et al. 2013). The ultimate record is held by the paper of Marsh et al. (2013) describing 277 new braconid wasps from Costa Rica. This paper is remarkable also because it became the first “turbo-taxonomic” paper where all 277 new species were registered in Zoobank automatically in just a few seconds, saving a great deal of time to the authors, publisher and the registry.

There are significant differences in the scope and number of nomenclatural acts that are tracked by the current indexes and registries (Table 1). In several cases, acts are treated differently by the biological codes. For example, new suprafamilial names and new combinations are governed by the ICNafp, but not by ICZN.

In our view, the registration (or indexing in groups where registration is not yet mandated by the code) of nomenclatural acts and the quality control of the bibliographic metadata in these registries should be a primary responsibility of publishers and registry curators and, to a lesser extent, of authors. Registration of a nomenclatural act could be initiated by an author, at the pre-submission or pre-acceptance for publication stage. However, we prefer the publisher-initiated model as it avoids registry curators curating data that may never be published according to the rules of the relevant code. Such a practice may lead to “over-saturation” of the registries with names that are not validly published, causing confusion. Focusing on names accepted for publication also allows these curators more time to focus on the published act and this may allow these specialist staff to assist publication by identifying inconsistencies with the relevant code. Moreover, the publishers’ role is essential in checking and correcting the pre-publication registration details against the ultimately published information. The model presented below could easily be adapted for author initiation, though we envisage that there would be a greater curatorial overhead and a greater likelihood of errors being created. However, we accept that the model needs to be flexible and allow alternatives if it is to receive community support.

In the “journal-centric” model, the registration of taxonomic and nomenclatural acts involves two main classes of actors: (1) publishers, or editors, and (2) registry curators. The publisher takes the responsibility for initiating the registration of nomenclatural acts so that the workflow can be performed following a common stepwise model (see also Fig. 1):

Step 1. XML message from the publisher to the registry on acceptance of the manuscript containing the type of act, taxon names, and preliminary bibliographic metadata; the registry will store the data but not make these publicly available before the final publication date.

Step 2a. Response XML report containing the unique identifier of the act as supplied by the registry and/or any relevant error messages.

Step 2b. Error correction and de-duplication performed manually: human intervention, at either registry’s or publisher’s side (or at both).

Step 3. Inclusion of registry supplied identifiers in the published treatments (protologues, nomenclatural acts).

Step 4. Making the information in the registry publicly accessible upon publication, providing a link from the registry record to the article.

The registration process should be as automated as possible. There are several reasons to maximize automation of registration, the most significant being:

Within the framework of the EU FP7 project pro-iBiosphere, and in close collaboration with Zoological Record, ZooBank, IPNI, MycoBank and Index Fungorum, as well as with the Global Names project (www.globalnames.org) we are developing a workflow and associated XML formats to streamline the registration of nomenclatural acts within the pre-publication process. The workflow was piloted by IPNI for higher plants and ZooBank for animals and the journals PhytoKeys and ZooKeys, respectively. The formats differ between the two main biological codes, ICNafp and ICZN, hence we describe these separately below.

The registration workflow and XML formats published in this article are free to use for anyone who would like to implement it. To ensure broader adoption of the registration model, the data exchanged through the workflow should be encoded in a standard. For zoology, journals should adopt the TaxPub XML schema (Catapano 2010; open source available at: https://github.com/tcatapano/TaxPub/releases/tag/v0.5-beta) which encodes publications as required by the zoological code. For botany, the registration workflow uses currently a custom XML format based on the

Taxon Concept Transfer Schema

The Suppl. materials 1–4 show some data encoded for the pilot project using a custom XML format – whilst this shows the kind of data that will be exchanged, it should not be used as a template – the TCS and TaxPub standards should be used as reference.

Once the editorial workflow is defined, and structured data can be produced according to these standards, journal editors should contact registries for access to their

Application Programming Interfaces

The authors of this article, staff at the registries and at Pensoft are available to consult journals who intend to implement the automated registration process. Future changes to the automated registration workflow will be published on the Wiki page of the pro-iBiosphere project at http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Pilot_2.