Taxonomy shifts up a gear: New publishing tools to accelerate biodiversity research

Biodiversity is under severe threat. It is estimated that there are untold millions of species on the planet and we have, in the past 250 years and recently with a decreasing number of specialists, described only about 2 million of them.Th ough this happens with an agonizing low description rate of an estimated number of 20,000 new species per year Th e principles of Open Access greatly facilitate dissemination of information through the Web where it is freely accessed, shared and updated in a form that is accessible to indexing and data mining engines using Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 turns the taxonomic information into a global resource well beyond the taxonomic community. A signifi cant bottleneck in naming species is the requirement by the current Codes of biological nomenclature ruling that new names and their associated descriptions must be published on paper, which can be slow, costly and render the new information diffi cult to fi nd. In order to make progress in documenting the diversity of life, we must remove the publishing impediment in order to move taxonomy "from a cottage industry into a production line"