On 28/03/2013 18:50, Nat Echols wrote:
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.
If someone has already done the other experiments, the absolutely best
outcome for society is for the two to get together and write the paper
as co-authors -- instead of precious funding money being wasted with a
second fool doing exactly the same experiments in a silly rat-race.
Lovely, so that leaves us with the trivial question of making people
acknowledge other people's data when they publish. I suppose we can ask
Watson for pointers (not Crick, he's not around anymore).
