Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Ticket #4871, comment 5


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Timestamp:
Jul 7, 2021, 1:16:46 PM (4 years ago)
Author:
Tom Goddard

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  • Ticket #4871, comment 5

    initial v1  
    1 I agree the current situation is poor, all sharing of science data is really in bad shape, and the PDB is a remarkable exception.  A basic obstacle to this generic scene format and providing machine-readable figures is who really cares enough about it to work on it?  Most researchers who would want to see the 3D view of a figure know PyMol or ChimeraX or VMD and if they have the data they can get the same view.  It wastes their time to reproduce the view.  Know doubt having a machine-readable version available that works in their preferred software would be handy.  But is it handy enough that everyone will come together and implement it?  The software developers, the PDB, maybe hardest of all getting the researchers to make these machine-readable figure files.  The researchers won't even deposit their data unless forced to.  So while the goal is admirable.  It seems  to me the need for it balanced against the difficulty of getting everyone to implement it and use it make it very unlikely to succeed.  Personally I would be much more motivated to get researchers to deposit their data in an archive.  I'd say about 80% of the data I read about that I want to look at is not available -- with crippling effect on science.  After that I am highly motivated to change the standards of publishing so that most of science is not held behind paywalls.  These are examples of science communication problems that I think are much more important to work on and have strong community support than machine-readable figures.
     1I agree the current situation is poor, all sharing of science data is really in bad shape, and the PDB is a remarkable exception.  A basic obstacle to this generic scene format and providing machine-readable figures is who really cares enough about it to work on it?  Most researchers who would want to see the 3D view of a figure know PyMol or ChimeraX or VMD and if they have the data they can get the same view.  It wastes their time to reproduce the view.  No doubt having a machine-readable version available that works in their preferred software would be handy.  But is it handy enough that everyone will come together and implement it?  The software developers, the PDB, maybe hardest of all getting the researchers to make these machine-readable figure files.  The researchers won't even deposit their data unless forced to.  So while the goal is admirable.  It seems  to me the need for it balanced against the difficulty of getting everyone to implement it and use it make it very unlikely to succeed.  Personally I would be much more motivated to get researchers to deposit their data in an archive.  I'd say about 80% of the data I read about that I want to look at is not available -- with crippling effect on science.  After that I am highly motivated to change the standards of publishing so that most of science is not held behind paywalls.  These are examples of science communication problems that I think are much more important to work on and have strong community support than machine-readable figures.
    22
    33Despite my negative comments I am in favor of machine-readable figures.  I make these comments because I think it is important to think carefully to avoid wasting effort on projects that will not succeed.