Dear Colleagues, I have followed this thread with great interest. It reminds me of the Open Commission Meeting of the Biological Macromolecules Commission in Geneva in 2002 at the IUCr Congress. Ie at which it was concluded that protein coordinates and diffraction data would not be provided to referees.
The ethics and rights of readers, authors and referees is a balancing act, as Jeremy and others have emphasised these different constituency's views. The aim of this email though is to draw your attention to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) work and case studies, which are extensive. Ie see:- http://publicationethics.org/ The COPE Forum will also provide advice on case submissions that are made of alleged publication malpractice, various of which are quite subtle. The processes as well though following on from obvious malpractice eg how a university research malpractice committee can be convened are also detailed. Greetings, John Prof John R Helliwell DSc On 26 Apr 2012, at 06:10, Jeremy Tame <jt...@tsurumi.yokohama-cu.ac.jp> wrote: > The problem is it is not the PI who is jumping, it may be a postdoc he/she is > throwing. > > Priority makes careers (look back at the Lavoisier/Priestly, Adams/LeVerrier > or > Cope/Marsh controversies), and the history of scientific reviewing is not all > edifying. > > Too many checks, not enough balances. Science is probably better served if the > author can publish without passing on the pdb model to a potentially > unscrupulous > reviewer, and if there are minor errors in the published paper then a > competing > group also has reason to publish its own view. The errors already have to > evade the > excellent validation tools we now have thanks to so many talented programmers, > and proper figures and tables (plus validation report) should be enough for a > review. > The picture we have of haemoglobin is now much more accurate than the ones > which came out decades ago, but those structures were very useful in the mean > time. A requirement of resolution better than 2 Angstroms would probably stop > poor > models entering PDB, but I don't think it would serve science as a whole. > Science > is generally a self-correcting process, rather than a demand for perfection > in every > paper. Computer software follows a similar pattern - bug reports don't always > invalidate the > program. > > I have happily released data and coordinates via PDB before publication, even > back in the > 1990s when this was unfashionable, but would not do so if I felt it risked a > postdoc > failing to publish a key paper before competitors. It might be helpful if > journals were > more amenable to new structures of "solved" proteins as the biology often > emerges > from several models of different conformations or ligation states. But in a > "publish or > perish" world, authors need rights too. Reviewers do a necessary job, but > there is a > need for balance. > > The attached figure shows a French view of Le Verrier discovering Uranus, > while > Adams uses his telescope for a quite different purpose. > > <Adams_Leverrier.jpg> > > > On Apr 26, 2012, at 2:01 AM, Ethan Merritt wrote: > >> On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 09:40:01 am James Holton wrote: >> >>> If you want to make a big splash, then don't complain about >>> being asked to leap from a great height. >> >> >> This gets my vote as the best science-related quote of the year. >> >> Ethan >> >> >> -- >> Ethan A Merritt >> Biomolecular Structure Center, K-428 Health Sciences Bldg >> University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742 >
