[3dem] Re: electron microscopy: where open access fails

[Cathy Lawson]

Dear Filip, CCP4BB, 3DEM, and PDB-L list members,

Thank you for your enthusiastic showing of community support for mandatory deposition of cryoEM maps to EMDB and for their timely release.

The two year hold is available to EMDB depositors for just one practical reason:  it encourages deposition of maps that we would probably otherwise not be getting at all (and those experiments would thus never be falsifiable).  Until journals and major funding agencies make deposition and immediate release mandatory, we have to compromise.   A large number of petition signatures ( http://www.petitiononline.com/cryoEM/petition.html ) will certainly help us to solidify our case. 

It is easy to forget that it was not until 1989 (17 years after the PDB began collecting X-ray structures) that community-set guidelines were published for X-ray crystallography coordinate deposition, and several more years before the journals required deposition as a prerequisite for publication.  Structure factor deposition only became mandatory in 2008. These policies emerged from cooperative action by the community of experimentalists and interestingly included a petition that was led by Fred Richards. The same process will be effective for the EM community.

Sincerely,

The EMDataBank.org team
http://emdatabank.org