An Open Forum meeting at ECM28 continued the process of public consultation that informs the activities of the Working Group. 15 people were present, including representatives of databases, commercial instrument manufacturers, software developers and practising structural scientists. After a brief report on the progress of the WG, new input was solicited.
Suggestions included the provision of a lightweight interface allowing a scientist easily to annotate data sets during the process of uploading to a storage service. There was a sense that a community-driven central storage facility would be attractive, but a central metadata registry coupled to distributed storage (possibly using commercial suppliers) was another potentially workable solution. An invitation to argue against the retention of raw data - in principle in perpetuity - raised no dissenting voices. Some discussion touched on an optimum target for realistic retention periods; it was pointed out that in practice this could vary according to national policies. There was also general approval for the idea of collecting data sets for structures that had proved impossible to solve, as a future resource to be exploited; but a sense that this should take a lower priority than securing data sets associated with published work.
Perhaps most surprisingly no one spoke against the posited statement regarding release of publicly funded data after a given time period, where no publication had resulted. This is a practice adopted by e.g. space science and astronomy, who use three years as the time period. Most interestingly this procedure is already adopted by the UK National Crystallography Service.
A more complete report will be posted also to the DDDWG public discussion forum.
Present at the Open Forum meeting were:
John Helliwell Manchester U. john.helliwell@manchester.ac.uk
Simon Coles Southampton U. s.j.coles@soton.ac.uk
Colin Groom CCDC groom@ccdc.cam.ac.uk
Pete Wood CCDC wood@ccdc.cam.ac.uk
Loes Kroon-Batenburg Utrecht U. l.m.j.kroon-batenburg@uu.nl
Brian McMahon IUCr bm@iucr.org
Mitchell Guss Sydney U. mitchell.guss@sydney.edu.au
Andrius Merkys Vilnius U. IBT andrius.merkys@gmail.com
Manfred Weiss HZB Berlin manfred.weiss@helmhotz-berlin.de
Herbert Bernstein Dowling College yayahjb@gmail.com
Frances Bernstein fcb@bernstein-plus-sons.com
Rafael S. Nunes INESP rafael.nunes@gmail.com
Dale Tronrud Oregon State U. tronrudd@science.oregonstate.edu
Naohiro Matsugaki KEK-PF naohiro.matsugaki@kek.jp
Kimiko Hasegawa Rigaku Corp. kimiko@rigaku.co.jp
Brian McMahon