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).
|