ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa. On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds:
<b>Warning</b>: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output startedSo, something to fix there.
at /home/pensofto/public_html/zookeys/cache/t_compile/%%C2^C2D^C2D18A7A%%rss.tpl.php:5)
in <b>34</b><br />
The RSS feeds are reasonably informative, although they don't include the DOI, which somewhat defeats the point of having them. DOIs need to be first class citizens in taxonomic literature.
But these are technical matters, the real question is why? Why create a new journal when Zootaxa is pumping out new taxaonomic papers at an astonishing rate. Why not combine forces (DOIs and RSS for Zootaxa, yay!)? There is an editorial doi:10.3897/zookeys.1.11 that is rather coy about this. Yes, Open Access is a Good Thing™, but Zootaxa has some Open Access articles. Why dilute the effort to transform zoological taxonomy by creating a new journal?
