On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 11:28 AM, <[log in to unmask]> 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
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