No. :-) When you are a reviewer for structural papers in journals (I do this work sometimes), and when you see an article that has (in this example) Tom's structure in it, but he and/or his mentor is not an author, then you call the editor and tell them "you may have a problem". I realize that the case may not be closed with that statement because the manuscript could indeed be totally legitimate and genuine, but it would be a signal in my mind to watch for. A "friend" could not just run with the data and publish. A competing group could take advantage and get ahead in their project inexpensively (provided that the posted data are what you think they are). But that is sort of the point of publishing result (I must remember to leave my idealism at home tomorrow).
Our old approach is to keep a lid on all your data until the paper is published. Although it is hard to imagine, there could be a mechanism by which you make all your data public, immediately when you get it and this public record shows who "owns" it. The advantage (in my mind) of such a system would be that you would also make public the data that does not make sense to you (it does not fit your scientific model) and this could (and has) lead to great discoveries. The disadvantage to the method is that you will sometimes post experiments that are just completely wrong (you did not measure what you said you measured) and this might make you look "dumb" (not really, this happens all the time; a favorite saying is 'we all make mistakes, we just make sure they don't leave the room'). And furthermore, you would finally have a "journal of unpublishable data", where all the experiments that we should not have done for one reason or another reside and can act as a warning what not to do in the future. It is possible that I am socialist. In the US that is not a good thing, but I don't worry about it. Furthermore, teaching/learning is a concern. More and more places no longer have the resources or the patience to teach or learn crystallography. I once heard a friend say something along these lines: people who did not learn crystallography are now teaching the next generation. As proof for that, he explained that experiments are done at synchrotrons that clearly show that not the beamline is broken, but the operator does not understand the concepts and therefore the data collected are not useful. In my world I see crystallography as a tool, and no longer as a goal all by itself (it was a goal when I was a graduate student). I am frequently concerned that protein crystallography will go the way of "small molecule crystallography": a few places provide this service and as an experimentalist you don't much worry about how they do it. Of course, until it becomes super-easy to produce high-quality protein and crystals, this won't happen. Mark With apologies to Tom, I don't have a stop-button, Raji is right about that. -----Original Message----- From: vellieux <[email protected]> To: CCP4BB <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Mar 28, 2013 1:54 am Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] delete subject Hello, I stayed away from this thread until now - the major reason being that I was fitting snugly under my quilt. However I feel compelled to react now: placing your data in a public repository (thereby "proving" that you did the work) also means that a "colleague", "friend" or whatever can and will publish your work for you. Once your work has been published you cannot publish it again, you did the work and the "colleague", "friend" or whatever has in fact appropriated your work. In the world of dreams I was living in until a few moments ago (it was night time), this is perhaps the way we should act. In the real world we live in, even your "colleague" upstairs will publish your work if he / she has a chance to do it because by doing so he / she will improve his / her career while ensuring that yours doesn't take off. Fred. On 28/03/13 01:34, [email protected] wrote: 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 -- Fred. Vellieux (B.Sc., Ph.D., hdr) ouvrier de la recherche IBS / ELMA 41 rue Jules Horowitz F-38027 Grenoble Cedex 01 Tel: +33 438789605 Fax: +33 438785494
