Earlier today, I thought this and did not write it. It is a slightly different theme on your suggestion:
I hear there are now (but have not seen examples of) "journals" (web sites) where you do exactly what Tom did: you put your data there, which "proves" that you did the work (first) and you do not worry about the fact that you are making it public before formal publication, because making data public is the reason why you got the data in the first place. And nobody can claim to have done the work, because everybody knows that someone else was first - the web site is "proof". The results are not peer-reviewed of course (even though, in the case of CCP4, things are inherently peer-reviewed to some extent, that is what he asked us to do). And I hear that there are now journals that will accept references to such web sites. Freely sharing unpublished data on a public forum might well be the future, even if in our corner of science this is not yet commonplace. The pivotal point to Tom is that he can learn from the suggestions that have been made. I hope he will. I actually hope that he will follow up on the suggestions (privately maybe). Unlike some, I do not feel that it was bad to find a big file in my inbox, this is what "move to" is for. I think my reaction was "ouch, he did not want to do what he just did and it cannot be undone". But maybe this is not true. There is definitely value in sharing preliminary data, especially for junior people. To have such a function as part of CCP4 might be a very good suggestion, but I agree with you that perhaps it should not land in its full glory in everyone's mailbox. Mark -----Original Message----- From: William G. Scott <[email protected]> To: CCP4BB <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, Mar 27, 2013 6:09 pm Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] delete subject Dear Tom et al: Although arriving too late to participate in the snark-fest, it occurred to me that maybe this is almost exactly how we should solve structures and educate graduate students (or others). Instead of attachments, the relevant files could be shared via dropbox. Those of generous spirit could help solve, refine, correct, critique or otherwise improve structures before formal peer review. (If everyone knows the source of the data, it is far less likely to be ripped off, not more.) It might cut down on the number of mistakes (or worse) that appear in the PDB and journals, new mentorships and collaborations might be established, in exceptional cases co-authorship, or more generally, an acknowledgement could be offered. For students like mine who are comparatively isolated in a small institution somewhat off the beaten path, it would be a real asset and advantage to them not to have to rely only upon my limited abilities and increasingly obsolete knowledge. We should all be able to learn from one anther without fear of reproach. All the best, Bill William G. Scott Professor Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and The Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA 228 Sinsheimer Laboratories University of California at Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California 95064 USA On Mar 27, 2013, at 3:36 PM, Tom Van den Bergh <[email protected]> wrote: > Is it possible to delete my post: refinement protein structure from ccp4 bb, > i get too many bad reactions. I think its bettter to just delete the whole topic. > > Greetings, > > Tom
