I have said my piece of the issue of depositing but there is one comment I would like to address.
Besides, I thought that by now there are some standards on how data should > be processed (this has been discussed on this BB once every few months, if > I'm not mistaken). Isn't that part of the validation process that so many > good people have established? Also, to the best of my knowledge (and > experience) referees (at least of some journals) are instructed to look into > those issues these days and comment about them, aren't they? > > There is a big difference between data that is processed correctly and data that is processed well. I'm reminded of a Yogi Berra quote "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." Every year our grad level crystallography course would take the same lysozyme data set and break into groups of two to process them independently in HKL2000 and every year we'd get a vastly different array of statistics. All of the processing would produce valid structure factors that were essentially the same and all would pass SFCHECK. The difference in the numbers varied for many reasons including the choice of reference image, initial spot number picking, profile fitting radius, spot size, the use of 3D profile fitting, choice of scaling factors and whether appropriate sacrifices had been made to the Denzo gods. And though the overall backbone and structure remained mostly the same there were clearly some who had better maps than the others. So yes there is a standard protocol in place and it can identify and correct gross error but by no means does that indicate the data was processed well. Sincerely, Katherine
