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A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening To Topple Taxonomy (smithsonianmag.com)
From a report: To study life on Earth, you need a system. Ours is Linnaean taxonomy, the model started by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Linnaeus's two-part species names, often Latin-based, consist of both a genus name and a species name, i.e. Homo sapiens. Like a library's Dewey Decimal system for books, this biological classification system has allowed scientists around the world to study organisms without confusion or overlap for nearly 300 years. But, like any library, taxonomy is only as good as its librarians -- and now a few rogue taxonomists are threatening to expose the flaws within the system. Taxonomic vandals, as they're referred to within the field, are those who name scores of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their finds. Like plagiarists trying to pass off others' work as their own, these glory-seeking scientists use others' original research in order to justify their so-called "discoveries." "It's unethical name creation based on other people's work," says Mark Scherz, a herpetologist who recently named a new species of fish-scaled gecko. "It's that lack of ethical sensibility that creates that problem." The goal of taxonomic vandalism is often self-aggrandizement. Even in such an unglamorous field, there is prestige and reward -- and with them, the temptation to misbehave. "If you name a new species, there's some notoriety to it," Thomson says. "You get these people that decide that they just want to name everything, so they can go down in history as having named hundreds and hundreds of species." The problem may be getting worse, thanks to the advent of online publishing and loopholes in the species naming code. With vandals at large, some researchers are less inclined to publish or present their work publicly for fear of being scooped, taxonomists told me. "Now there's a hesitation to present our data publically, and that's how scientists communicate," Thomson says. "The problem that causes is that you don't know who is working on what, and then the scientists start stepping on each other's toes."
I know blockchain is a bit tired at this point, but this sounds like the right sort of application for it. In order to successfully publish you would have to get enough people to accept your contribution. Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.
This is an odd post for the Slashdot crowd as systematics is a somewhat esoteric field even among biologists. The truth is that there have always been wars between the "splitters" and the "lumpers," the former happily naming lots of new species while the latter arguing against such foolishness. The thing is that the only people who care about such nuances are the systematists themselves and maybe ecologists who are trying to use their naming system to classify ecosystems, etc. What I've found maddening is that systematists often seemed to care little about the definition of "species." If you have a continuum of organisms with slightly varying morphology, where do you draw species lines? Can they interbreed? Lots of basic biology ignored in the mad dash to name everything. It's a hard problem.