There's a second side to that. Reviewers who can't get enough data and request even more when you submit a decent paper with 18 pages of supplement for example.
Jürgen On Mar 29, 2013, at 7:32 AM, Toufic El Arnaout wrote: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0053374 On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Eric Bennett <er...@pobox.com<mailto:er...@pobox.com>> wrote: Scott, I'm not sure I understand your last paragraph. Once researchers have had their data pass peer review (which I interpret as meaning a journal has accepted it), how often do you think it happens that it does not immediately get published? Just depositing data in the PDB, or posting it on a public web site, is not "meet[ing] the veracity of peer review". There is something to be said for giving credit to the first people who have subjected their data to peer review and had the data pass that step, otherwise people will be tempted to just post data of dubious quality to stake a public claim before the quality of the data has been independently checked. In a case where this initial public non-peer-reviewed posting is of unacceptable data quality, that would dilute credit granted to another person who later obtained good data. An unfortunate number of problematic structures still sneak through peer review. Relaxing quality review standards that must be passed before a scientist gets to claim credit for a discovery is a step backwards IMO. Cheers, Eric On Mar 28, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Scott Pegan wrote: Hey everyone, Both Mark and Fred make some good points. I totally agree with Nat (beat me to the send button). Although in an ideal world with all the advancements in crowd sourcing and electronic media, one might think that posting data on a bulletin board might be considered marking one's turf and protect the scientist place in that pathway towards discoveries. Regrettably, the current reality doesn't' support this case. As structural biologists, we are still in the mode of first to publish gets the bulk of the glory and potentially future funding on the topic. For instance, when I was in graduate school, the lab I was in had KcsA crystals at the same time as a couple of competing groups. Several groups including the one I belong to had initial diffraction data. One group was able to solve KcsA, the first K channel trans-membrane protein structure, first. That group was led by Roderick Mackinnon, now a Noble Laureate partly because of this work. Now imagine if one of Mackinnon's student would have put up the web their initial diffraction data and another group would have used it to assist in their interpretation of their own data and either solved the structure before Mackinnon, or at least published it prior. Even if they acknowledged Mackinnion for the assistance of his data (as they should), Mackinnion and the other scientists in his lab would likely not have received the broad acclaim that they received and justly deserved. Also, ask Rosalind Franklin how data sharing worked out for her. Times haven't changed that much since ~10 years ago. Actually, as many have mentioned, things have potentially gotten worse. Worse in the respect that the scientific impact of structure is increasingly largely tide to the biochemical/biological studies that accompany the structure. In other words, the discoveries based on the insights the structure provides. Understandably, this increasing emphasis on follow up experiments to get into high impact journals in many cases increases the time between solving the structure and publishing it. During this gap, the group who solved the structure first is vulnerable to being scoped. Once scoped unless the interpretation of the structure and the conclusion of the follow up experiments are largely and justifiably divergent from the initial publications, there is usually a significant difficulty getting the article published in a top tier journal. Many might argue that they deposited it first, but I haven't seen anyone win that argument either. Because follow up articles will cite the publication describing the structure, not the PDB entry. Naturally, many could and should argue that this isn't they way it should be. We could rapidly move science ahead in many cases if research groups were entirely transparent and made available their discovers as soon as they could meet the veracity of peer-review. However, this is not the current reality or model we operate in. So, until this changes, one might be cautious about tipping your competition off whether they be another structural biology group looking to publish their already solved structure, or biology group that could use insights gathered by your structure information for a publication that might limit your own ability to publish. Fortunately, for Tom his structure sounds like it is only important to a pretty specific scientific question that many folks might not be working on exactly. Scott -- ****************************************************** Toufic El Arnaout Trinity Biomedical Science Institute (TCD) 152-160 Pearse Street, Dublin 2 ****************************************************** ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Office: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-2926 http://lupo.jhsph.edu
