Dear friends, We are excited to introduce a new taxonomic series, published by our project the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA) a couple of weeks ago: https://bdj.pensoft.net/article/128431 This is a new, collaborative framework to accelerate high quality integrative taxonomy across all marine invertebrate phyla. Importantly, this is not about new distribution records, nor systematic revision, but pure taxonomy and trying to "clear the backlog" of species that are sitting on shelves waiting to be named. If you work on marine invertebrate identification, you probably have samples representing undescribed marine species on your shelves. Publishing species descriptions is difficult, even when the new species is totally clear, there is still limited professional incentive to publish stand-alone species descriptions, particularly for early career researchers. Most journals, even specialist taxonomic ones, expect insights beyond descriptive work, but which quite often are simply not available. Now, we want to hear about species "on the shelf" that "just" need a little work to round out the description: single species descriptions that are already almost complete and/or projects where you face some bottleneck (image processing, SEM, barcode, etc). We can offer lab support and publication support as part of our funded work in SOSA to accelerate taxonomy (i.e. free of charge - yes, really). Background and link to the application form to submit your requests: https://sosa.senckenberg.de/en/discover/ocean-species-discoveries/ Questions to Dr Jan Steger, SOSA lab manager: Deadline 30 September 2024. We welcome any invertebrate experts to collaborate, across all organismal groups (well, only marine invertebrates, but that is close enough to everything ;-). All phyla are welcome - please tell your (marine) colleagues. And, we hope you all enjoy the "chocolate box" of species in the new paper Best wishes, Julia Sigwart & Torben Riehl "j.sigwart@qub.ac.uk" (to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to golding@mcmaster.ca)