On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 11:28 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
http://deposit.rcsb.org (or international equivalent) > 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 There is a further problem: since as Frank pointed out, structures are increasingly less valuable without accompanying non-crystallographic experiments, there is a risk of other groups taking advantage of the availability of data and performing the experiments that *you* had hoped to do. Or, similarly, a group who already has compelling biochemical data lacking a structural explanation would immediately have everything they needed to publish. Either way, you would be deprived of what might have been a thorough and genuinely novel publication. Since most employment and funding decisions in the academic world are made on the basis of original and high-profile research and not simply "number of structures deposited in the PDB", this puts the crystallographer at a distinct disadvantage. This isn't purely hypothetical - a grad school classmate who worked on genome sequences complained about the same problem (in her case, the problem was bioinformatics groups analyzing the data - freely available on the NCBI site, as mandated by the funding agencies - before the sequencing was even complete). Of course the same argument has been used in the past against immediate release of PDB entries upon publication - and the community (quite appropriately, IMHO) rejected it as nonsense. I actually like the idea of releasing data ASAP without waiting to publish, but it has a lot of practical difficulties. -Nat
