Arguments about access to published data reached a peak of intensity when the draft sequence of the human genome was published in February last year. They resurface from time to time, and this week Ari Patrinos and Dan Drell make the case for allowing industry to restrict access as a trade-off for making valuable data publicly available (see page 589). Increased public access to private data is desirable, but Nature continues to believe that restricted access to data that we publish is in general inappropriate (see Nature 409, 745; 2001), particularly where public projects and databases exist. But it is surely right that the research community should consider these alternative proposals, and we encourage responses.

Many areas of biology have community databases and others are being developed for microarrays and brain imaging, for example. However, there is one core area of biology that is too often overshadowed but that also needs to take steps to provide greater access to its immense store of knowledge and annotation: taxonomy, the formal nomenclature and description of organisms.

Without taxonomy, nobody would be sure of the identity of the organisms they were interested in, or whether they belonged to the same or different species as the organisms studied by others. Without taxonomy, there would be no meaningful genome projects, and medical science, for one, would be seriously compromised. Without taxonomy, there could be no systematics, the related but distinct business of arranging species' names into an order that reflects their evolutionary relationships. Without taxonomy, we could not begin to understand biodiversity and the related issue of conservation. For a variety of reasons, some of them self-inflicted — recently explored by Charles Godfray (Nature 417, 17–19; 2002) — taxonomists have a poor image among other biologists. Taxonomy is starved of funds, whereas the arms of biology that rely fundamentally on it attract both money and publicity.

The great fragmentation of taxonomic publication has contributed to taxonomy's parlous state. Taxonomy would benefit from a high-profile, centralized repository of nomenclature. Nature is now taking a small step towards that end, requiring that authors of papers featuring new taxonomy should file this information with a recognized institution. We have set up such an arrangement with the Linnean Society of London, which is the oldest body in the world concerned with taxonomy, and which maintains the library and collections of Carl Von Linné (Linnaeus), who founded the modern system of taxonomy in the eighteenth century. From 1 August 2002, the authors of any paper containing the formal nomenclature and description of species that has been accepted in principle by Nature, shall be required as a condition of acceptance to send a preprint to the Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BF, UK or an electronic version by e-mail to john@linnean.org. Deposition shall be voluntary for papers accepted in principle before 1 August 2002.

Another ill that besets taxonomy is the inability of taxonomists to forge united initiatives. This is why our action as a journal is unilateral. Nevertheless, it is our hope that other journals will adopt the same policy, encouraging the future development of an instantly accessible electronic archive with agreed standards. And, as with genome sequence databases, if several recognized institutions decide to host taxonomy databases that Nature can support, so much the better.