I have read the comments in Nature and on the CCP4BB with excitement,
almost the same level of excitement with which I followed this year's
Tour de France. Speaking of which, I can see many analogies.
Political correctness aside, what is the meaning of an (internationally
acclaimed) journal if people cannot point out flaws in publicly
available scientific models, whether published in Nature or any other
journal? We can go to great length in making all crystallographic data
freely and publicly available but that doesn’t change the problem with
commercial journals as mentioned by Rupp. Mind you, I have never been
in the luxury position to contemplate submission to Nature, so maybe I
should stick with Robert Huber’s credo. It is not the credibility of
crystallography that is at stake, but the credibility of the big
journals, as phrased by Jones and Kleywegt.
Also, I am not interested in 'public excoriation' at all. I am fussed
about a clean database (PDB) and letters in journals that truly reflect
the opinion of scientists all over the world. It is embarassing to see
that accepting the comment by Jansen et al took 6 months, while
accepting the original papers containing a lot more experimental data
to judge took just over a month.
There was a recent debate about anonymous refereeing. Here is something
else to consider: whenever a paper contains a crystal structure it
should be refereed by at least one crystallographer (Bernard Rupp’s
pairing scheme). If this were to be a crystallographer working on
proteins/subjects unrelated to those in the paper, then there is less
need for the crystallographer to remain anonymous and this might help a
great deal in persuading authors to send off their raw data in
confidence.
Carien
Dr. Carien Dekker
Dept. Cell & Molecular Biology
Institute of Cancer Research
Chester Beatty Laboratories
237 Fulham Road
London, SW3 6JB
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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