[sdpd] Re: Comments on COD by anonymous reviewers

["L_Solovyov" <l_solovyov...@yahoo.com>]

People are strange?
Why on earth they continue drinking free fresh water while there are 100% reliable, certified, perfectly copyrighted, protected by an army of attorneys and reasonably priced beverages such as Coca Cola for instance?!

--- In sdpd...@yahoogroups.com, Armel Le Bail <armel.le_bail...@...> wrote:
>
> Are the COD Advisory Board members prepared to a legal
> action against them ?
> 
> This reviewers comment received aftre the COD paper
> submission is a closing speech for prosecution :
> 
> Integral text...
> 
> "As a summary of the history and current status of the COD, this paper 
> deserves publication in J. Appl. Cryst., but since it does have some 
> polemic aspects, perhaps it should appear in a database issue with papers 
> from the established databases.  The paper should be very useful - but not 
> in ways the authors intend. On publication, it will be very valuable to 
> attorneys for the established databases.  Directive 96/9/EC of the European 
> Parliament, and its implementation in national legislation, provide very 
> strong intellectual property protection for databases, and this paper (and 
> the web records of the COD) should provide ample justification for legal 
> action against the creators of the COD and shutdown of the COD.  The 
> Editors need to decide whether they want to become involved in such disputes.
> 
> The COD is sold to the community on false pretenses.  Once errors must be 
> corrected, changes must be tracked, there is a central repository, there 
> are maintainers and developers, data needs to be keyed in by hand, 
> duplicates are flagged and reviewed manually, entries are re-validated and 
> adjusted, and web mirrors are developed, real costs are incurred - and 
> these costs need to be paid by someone.  Ensuring that data published in 
> the COD persists as long as needed into the future also requires real expenses.
> 
> All organizations have learned that it is increasingly difficult to get 
> volunteers for anything.  The history of all the database organizations is 
> that they began as small groups of volunteers, who realized that the task 
> was too big for volunteers, and that organizations were needed to ensure 
> curation and permanence.  If the current COD volunteers are working on 
> their own time, that is fine, but if they are "borrowing" time funded for 
> other purposes, they are stealing somebody's tax dollars!  The paper as it 
> stands in unacceptable for publication.  Statements about where the money 
> comes from now and in the future are necessary.  There is no reason to 
> contribute to the COD if there is doubt about its permanence.
> 
> The authors do not make a case why they are wasting worldwide 
> crystallographic resources in duplicating effort already done.  (Never mind 
> the insanity of 3+ organizations - FIZ, Toth, MPDS, and ICDD - abstracting 
> the same inorganic structural data!)  The existing databases serve the 
> community well, and at a very low price.  The authors will admit that the 
> track records of governments at supporting scientific infrastructure of any 
> sort (and especially buried resources such as databases) are very poor.  I 
> have no confidence that any government will fund crystallographic databases 
> properly, and believe that a user-pays model is much better in the long 
> term.  The fact that the PDB is "free" is an accident of history; the 
> vision to create it came from a US national laboratory, and funding at a 
> marginal level has continued since then.  Academics (especially European 
> academics) seem to believe that information is free, and exhibit an 
> appalling ignorance of economics, and where their own resources come from.
> 
> Statements that the existing databases are "too expensive" are simply 
> nonsense.  The databases are supplied to academics at very low prices, and 
> in many countries there are national licenses, so the users actually think 
> of them as free!  An experimentalist who needs them has at least $250,000 
> worth of instrumentation, so the plea that they cannot earn a few hundred 
> dollars to license a database is disingenuous, at best.  The existing 
> database organizations have made arrangements for developing countries, so 
> such countries need to work with the database organizations.  Anyone who 
> claims that teaching institutes cannot afford the fees of the usual 
> databases has clearly never contacted the database organizations.  All of 
> them I know will make their databases available for teaching use free of 
> charge.  The authors simply make too many incorrect statements to let this 
> paper be published at it stands.
> 
> The ranges used to scan for duplicates (0.5 Å on cell constants and 1.2° on 
> angles) are far too broad, and eliminate a great deal of potential utility 
> of the COD.
> 
> Reference(s) should be provided for the morphology program(s) written at 
> Portland State, and for the partial databases of modulated and magnetic 
> structures.  I additional to demonstrating little knowledge of economics 
> and the law, the authors do not exhibit enough professional courtesy in 
> their citations of existing work and resources.
> 
> The authors claim in the Conclusions to have demonstrated that an 
> alternative open access database is feasible.  My verdict is "not proven".
> Now for the really picky bits...  There are several incorrect uses of 
> "it's".  It is not correct to talk of a "CIF file"; CIF is Crystallographic 
> Information File. "
>




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