Explanation: Can I submit names I didn't author?

Authorship

In general, we recommend that you only submit names with which you are sufficiently familiar to ensure the quality, accuracy, and completeness of the submission. This is best attained when you are the author of the name, but in some cases, this is not possible. Therefore, we recommend following these set of policies:

Are you the author of the effective publication?

If you are the author of the publication, it is recommended that you get approval for submission from your coauthors. This can be done, for example, through the corresponding author. This is not a requirement, but we will ask (and report) if a list author has or not approval from their coauthors.

Are you the author of a name that depends on another name?

When you propose new species names, these depend directly on the valid publication of their genus name. For subspecies, these depend on the valid publication of both species and genus names. Therefore, you might find yourself blocked from validly publishing names if those dependencies are not met. In these cases, we recommend one of two options:

1. You can indicate this dependency in the correspondence with curators, and we will attempt to engage with the original authors for the prompt submission of the names. If we don't get a response after a month of contacting them, we move forward with the registration of the names ourselves, so your names are no longer blocked.
2. You can contact the authors yourself to invite them to submit the names or to give you permission to submit them. We recommend waiting for at least one month for their response before moving forward to submitting the names without approval and documenting the process to craft your (public) statement on authorship for the submission.

Are you the author of a name of a taxon that is part of a taxon without validly published name?

Let's say, for example, that you are proposing a new genus name, and the family has a recognized (but not validly published) name based on a different genus. Should you go ahead and propose your genus? Would that change the name of the family now? You should propose it; this will not change the name of the family (or any ranks above) thanks to the protections of the Whitman et al 2023 amendment. You can simply leave the temporary designation as the family of your genus; this will not affect your submission or the future name of the family. Similarly, if you are proposing a new genus but you're not confident about the novelty of any rank above, you can simply propose the taxonomy string for which you are confident and report it as incertae sedis. For example, if you're certain your genus corresponds to a novel order but you're not sure about the class status, you can propose the genus, family, and order names, and report that order as incertae sedis indicating the likely affiliation at phylum or domain levels. You don't need complete taxonomy strings to propose novel names.

Are you interested in preserving the stability of names of taxa with which you're familiar?

If you're not in any of the above categories, but you're still interested in the stability of names in a taxon of interest, you can contribute by following option 2 from the section "Are you the author of a name that depends on another name?" If you're interested in organizing a taxon-specific working group in the SeqCode Committee to launch a large-scale effort in this line, contact us.