Dear Colleagues,
I have placed my lecture slides and abstract presented at Liverpool University on the 11th September at Zenodo:-
https://zenodo.org/records/13777914
This includes a weblink to the event itself and which includes a weblink to a video of my lecture (45 minutes).
The Contents list of my talk is:-
• There is a massive thrust on Open Science from Governments, Organisations and Funding Agencies
• Puzzlingly Trust is not emphasised. Peer review of articles with underpinning data is a tradition of crystallography including community agreed validation checks as standard to try and ensure Trust. Exemplars are IUCr’s Checkcif and PDB’s Validation Report
• The question arises, once editor (and their referees) and database validator are content with an article and underpinning data, what are the standard uncertainties on atomic coordinates and atomic displacement parameters? These are needed because a measurement or a parameter of a model without a standard uncertainty estimate is basically rather meaningless.
• Expansion of digital data archiving allows raw data preservation reaching close to objectivity in science
• In law the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is sought, so why not in science as well?! The whole truth then being the raw ie primary experimental data for any published study made possible by the new digital data archives with their huge capacities these days compared with the past.
Best wishes,
John R Helliwell
Editor in Chief Acta Crystallographica and Chairman of the IUCr Commission on Journals 1996 to 2005;
IUCr Representative to the International Council of Technical and Scientific Information 2005 to 2014;
IUCr Representative to the International Sicence Council's Committee on Data (CODATA) 2012 to 2023;
Chairman of the IUCr Diffraction Data Deposition Working Group (2011 to 2017) and of the IUCr Committee on Data (2017 to 2023);
IUCr Rrepresentative to UNESCO's Open Science Working Groups (2022 to 2024).