I have to say to the credit of Nature and competent authors that in every case I have requested structure factors and coordinates for review
they have arranged to provide these. AFAIK this is their editorial policy, but it requires that at least one of the reviewers knows what to do with the SF as and coordinates. That, however, does not (yet??) seem to be policy, i.e. to pair a technical crystallography review with one that evaluates biological and other relevance. BR From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:ccp...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Prof. Joel L. Sussman Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 1:31 AM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] FW: pdb-l: Retraction of 12 Structures.... 11-Dec-2009 11:30 Rehovot Dear All, I Agree fully with Tommi, and feel, in parallel, we in the MX community must think of better tools for referees to review papers and insist that these be followed. For example we should insist on getting BOTH the coords and structure factors for papers submitted, so it would be possible to do test on the structures which appear to have 'question marks'. Without this data, it is very difficult to do a serious job in refereeing. Also, any manuscript, submitted to any journal, where BOTH the structure factors and coords are not submitted to the PDB should be rejected immediately without further review. This should be the policy of the reviewer, independent of any particular policy of the journals. It might be worthwhile for the MX community to also consider writing a strong letter to the journals in which published the papers for which the structures have now been retracted, to state just how serious this matter is and that the journals should also take much more responsibility of finding better ways to have these papers and structures reviewed. Joel ------------------------------------------------- Prof. Joel L. Sussman Director, Israel Structural Proteomics Center Dept. of Structural Biology Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot 76100 ISRAEL Tel: +972 8-934 4531 Fax: +972 8-934 6312 joel.suss...@weizmann.ac.il www.weizmann.ac.il/~joel; www.weizmann.ac.il/ISPC ------------------------------------------------- On 11 Dec 2009, at 11:19, Tommi Kajander wrote: Would the exact analysis of how each of these things were wrong and fabricated be somewhere available???? Would be fair (apart from the known case of C3b) to have the whole analysis available instead of just this kind of news feed. I suspect its not obvious by five minute check in all cases. Perhaps there needs to be ways within PDB in form of automated tools that would raise those red flags in suspicious cases (e.g. some data analysis --such as the contribution by solvent etc now that data beyond 8Å is by default used in refinement) - as it appears peer review/editing by journals isn't/cant always be(?) stringent enough. In any case, some type of automated analysis of the whole data base might be a good idea, as there can be other cases (with another couple of thousand papers citing them..). tommi On Dec 10, 2009, at 4:16 PM, Ibrahim Moustafa wrote: "After a thorough examination of the available data, which included a re-analysis of each structure alleged to have been fabricated, the committee found a preponderance of evidence that structures 1BEF, 1CMW, 1DF9/2QID, 1G40, 1G44, 1L6L, 2OU1, 1RID, 1Y8E, 2A01, and 2HR0 were more likely than not falsified and/or fabricated and recommended that they be removed from the public record," the university said in its statement this week."
