(my last spam)
This is very true. Compared to biomedicine, protein crystallographers are holy saints: Of 50 landmark papers in oncology, people from Amgen could only reproduce 6 (11%) and in a similar study, people at Bayer could only reproduce 14 out of 67 (21%) studies. Even more troubling, non-reproducible papers got cited more often then reproducible ones. I really hope the bubble will collapse soon since it led (leads) to the waste of billions of research euros (in industry and academia) and the testing of ineffective compounds on patients.
Sorry for this off-topic remark,
Herman
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.html
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Miguel Ortiz Lombardia
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2012 9:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Off-topic: Supplying PDB file to reviewers
El 19/04/12 18:42, Patrick Loll escribió:
>>
>> Well, it is clear from this comment that in different fields there are different rules... . In macromolecular Xtallolgraphy, where some people deal with biologists from biomedical sciences, the impact of journals is an important aspect during evaluation and, unfortunately, pre-publication review of structures has no actual value in their field. For a structural BIO-logist in biomedical sciences, a paper it is not "just a paper", it is an effort of years reduced to a (or few) paper(s). The non-structural BIO-people understand what is a Cell paper, but not at all about what it is a pre-publication of a structure. My thougts go in the direction of grant applications, fellowships, promotion, all filtered by the impact factor but not by pre-publication of structures which, btw, it is neither considered in the h-index of a researcher.
>>
>
> Oh what the hell, someone else poured the gasoline, I may as well supply a lit match:
>
> What Maria says is absolutely true--I dwell among biologists, so I fully understand the rules of the field. But it's not so clear that these rules are good ones.
>
> Biology is obsessed with high impact, and I argue science is ill served by this preoccupation. The highest impact-factor journals seem to have the highest number of retractions (see this past Tuesday's New York Times Science section for a discussion). And in this forum it's certainly germane to note that the technical quality of published structures is, on average, poorer in the highest impact journals (at least by some criteria; see the paper from Brown & Ramaswamy in Acta Crystallogr D63: 941-50 (2007)).
>
> Pat
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
> Patrick J. Loll, Ph. D.
> Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Director, Biochemistry
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Indeed the rules are clearly bad. They're actually a mirror of the rules of political economy in our "western/capitalist/call-them-as-you-want"
societies. Actually, expect "bubble collapses" in the biological field.
Perhaps not spectacular, most probably not everything-falling-at-once, but surely not without serious implications. We also have our "too-big-to-fall" paradigms, especially in "bio-medicine". In any case, the rules are there and for most of the people who intend to keep working (most often working as in job, not as in art) in biological science (with or without double quotes) it is certainly easier to bow to them than to resist them. Understandably, for the latter option is most often punished sooner or later, with no shame, by those who exclude you from the so-called "excellence club". It would help if some big, truly respected names in biology would attack seriously these rules and put clear the damage they are causing to biological science. Some do, I'm now thinking of Peter Lawrence for example, but they are too few to be anything else than 'lone rangers'. It would be certainly even more helpful if we could unite and collectively reject this state of affairs.
But this is, for several reasons that would need a far too-long text for a bulletin board post, less expected than rain on the desert. Whatever the case, we bio-crystallographers are a very small set of the people working in biology. We may now and then have this kind of discussion where we put forward our concerns, our idealistic view of the peer review system, etc. Move aside, go to a lab of almost any other field in biology and tell them about these discussions; most of the time they will look at you as they would at a Martian.
Back to the original post: I have never been requested coordinates/data.
It's however clear to me that if the reviewer wants to see them (s)he has the right to do so. The problem here is not with this "right" of the reviewer but with all the trouble caused by the current rules. If "excellence", which translates in funding and salaries, had to be measured by "production", what would be the problem of posting pre-prints to some central repository, as in arxiv.org, so all the people in the field could criticise/improve them? There is a time-stamp so the original authors would be acknowledged, others working the same subject could add their own findings or move to a different subject before wasting much time; designing, working and reasoning flaws might be uncovered; the role of the whole community and not just of a few big-brains would be clear for everyone to see... Keeping the rules as they are reminds me of those astronomers complicating the Ptolemaic system to "save the appearances". And this is what we, you can include myself, are doing. Until the bubble collapses?
--
Miguel
Architecture et Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques (UMR6098) CNRS, Universités d'Aix-Marseille I & II Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
Tel: +33(0) 491 82 55 93
Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20
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http://w2.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia
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