On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Mark Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:

> Getting to Eric's point about an impasse, if the PDB will not claim the
> authority to safeguard the integrity of their holdings (as per their
> quoted statement in Bernhard's message below), then who can?


I think this may in part boil down to a semantic dispute over the meaning
of "integrity".  I interpreted it to mean "integrity (and public
availability) of the data as deposited by the authors", which by itself is
quite a lot of work.  Safeguarding the integrity of the peer-review process
is supposed to be the job of the journals, some of which - unlike the PDB -
are making a tidy profit from our efforts.  Since they justify this profit
based on the value they supposedly add as gatekeepers, I don't think it's
unreasonable for us to expect them to do their job, rather than leave it to
the PDB annotators, who surely have enough to deal with.

I do share some of the concern about 2hr0, but I am curious where the line
should be drawn.  This is an extraordinary case where the researcher's
institution requested retraction, but I think everyone who's been in this
field for a while has a list of dodgy structures that they think should be
retracted - not always with justification.

-Nat

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