Dear colleagues, whereas data sharing for most crystallographers appears to be a no-brainer, making coordinates and (most of the time, hopefully) structure factors available, it seems the electron microscopists are drastically lagging behind when it comes to making data available.
Many cryoEM structures are still being published without the corresponding maps being deposited in the EM database. In one particular case, I was interested in looking at a cryoEM map from a paper published in a well-renowned open access journal starting. The paper contains the EMDB accession codes for the maps, but these maps appear to be 'on hold' since over a year. Enquiry with the authors delivered a firm 'no' in releasing the maps: they claim it is OK to keep the maps on hold for 2 years, simply because the EMDB gives the option to do so. A further enquiry with the journal editors led to no avail: despite the clear journal policy on sharing both manuscripts and data, they were also unable to force the authors to release their maps, now ~13 months after publication of the paper. The fact that this was in an open access journal makes this all the more shocking. It is striking to see how much still has to be done to lift the cryoEM world up to the same standards as the crystallographic community (when it comes to sharing data, at least). Structures can simply be published without anybody being able to check the validity, let alone use it for obvious experiments such as docking crystal structures, integrative protein structure modeling, etc. With many structural targets going towards bigger and more challenging, combining cryoEM data with crystal structures is going to become more and more important. What can we, crystallographers, do to stimulate data-sharing in the cryoEM world? (My apologies to the cryoEM people on this bulletin board: if you have been making your maps available, you'll agree that clearly not everybody does...) Filip Van Petegem -- Filip Van Petegem, PhD Assistant Professor The University of British Columbia Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2350 Health Sciences Mall - Rm 2.356 Vancouver, V6T 1Z3 phone: +1 604 827 4267 email: [email protected] http://crg.ubc.ca/VanPetegem/
