ZooBank is an open access website intended to be the official International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) registry of zoological nomenclature. Any nomenclatural acts (e.g. publications that create or change a taxonomic name) need to be registered with ZooBank to be "officially" recognized by the ICZN Code of Nomenclature. Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) are used as the globally unique identifier for ZooBank registration entries. The ZooBank prototype was seeded with data from Index to Organism Names (http://www.organismnames.com), which was compiled from the scientific literature in Zoological Record now owned by Thomson Reuters.