[3dem] sharing em maps during peer-review process

Sjors Scheres scheres at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
Sat May 2 04:10:00 PDT 2015


Dear all,

I think moving towards more openness will be a good thing. As a reviewer
it is often hard to assess the quality of a map from 2D still pictures
alone, and having a look at the map will surely help to assess its
quality. Trust already is at the foundation of the review process. Whether
the reviewer also gets access to the map and the model does not change
much in that respect.

Reversed anonymity in the review process as suggested by Matthijn is
problematic because the identity of the authors is usually very easy to
distill from the paper itself. A useful comment on this (in the context of
double-blind review) is in Nature this week. Going the other way, with
open identities of both authors and reviewers, is attractive in some ways,
but also has its difficulties. I personally tend to tick the option to
reveal my identity as a reviewer in eLife, and have also had my papers
reviewed by people who revealed their identity. Last year I wrote one
negative review for a journal that did not have this option, and later
revealed myself to one of the authors and had an open, face-to-face
discussion with the intention to be helpful. However, revealing one's
identity as a reviewer also has a potential danger of bias towards being
less critical (perhaps especially for less established reviewers?), or the
danger of a culture where positive reviews are expected to be 'paid back'
later. Again, I think trust is the key word, and recognizing the
difficulties of every option is a good start.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think most of us are in this for the fun of it,
and to ultimately change the world for the better. More openness will
probably help in speeding up the scientific process. In that context I
also agree with Grant that discussing options like (bio)-arxiv may be
useful.

Sjors

> dear colleagues,
>
> i would be interested in experiences / suggestions / views of others in
> the
> field on  the following issue that may be of interest to many of us:
> the editor of our manuscript forwarded the request of a peer-reviewer to
> access the cryo-em map of our beloved complex. this has never happened to
> us, but to our surprise the editor did not consider the request to be
> unusual.
> of course, we share the point that the map would be of great help in
> judging the interpretation of the data. however, we also feel very
> uncomfortable sending the condensed result of lengthy research to an
> anonymous colleague, who could theoretically make considerable misuse of
> it. nevertheless, the policy of the journal seems to let us little
> choice: "Supporting
> data must be made available to editors and peer-reviewers at the time of
> submission for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript. Peer-reviewers
> may be asked to comment on the terms of access to materials, methods
> and/or
> data sets".
> in any case we would be curious whether others indeed got similar requests
> and how they dealt with it. a good solution for (paranoid?) people like us
> could be a good web-based viewer that lets others view our map, but i
> would
> not know of such a tool.
>
> Thanks
>
> Friedrich
>
> --
> Dr. Friedrich Foerster
> Max-Planck Institut fuer Biochemie
> Am Klopferspitz 18
> D-82152 Martinsried
>
> Tel: +49 89 8578 2632
> Fax: +49 89 8578 2641
>
> www.biochem.mpg.de/foerster
> _______________________________________________
> 3dem mailing list
> 3dem at ncmir.ucsd.edu
> https://mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/3dem
>


-- 
Sjors Scheres
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge Biomedical Campus
Cambridge CB2 0QH, U.K.
tel: +44 (0)1223 267061
http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/groups/scheres



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