Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@genbank.BIO.NET (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank Subject: Re: Quality of submitted data Message-ID: Date: 15 Aug 90 08:48:03 GMT References: <9008141623.AA00744@histone.lanl.gov.LANL.GOV> Organization: GenBank Online Service Lines: 41 Joe, Paul can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe that additional work which results in revision of the sequence data is also referenced in the data bank entries. This raises the spector of one's speedy publication being recorded in the data bank followed by a public listing of references in which all of one's errors are corrected by one's peers. Who would be eager to jump the gun in order to gain such recognition? The fear of public exposure might even have the opposite effect from what you suggest. The basic fact which has been brought up by journal editors repeatedly is that the vast majority of reviewers who get a paper containing sequence data in hardcopy are not going to take the time to enter the data into a computer. Without such analysis it is hard to say that the data has been thoroughly reviewed even though the paper was accepted for publication. The GenBank curator program mentioned by Paul in earlier postings is an attempt to have experts in defined areas actually review the data in the data bank with the aid of software. Of course, it may not be possible to find curators to carefully examine the entire gamut of sequence data, and some data problems will undoubtedly have to be resolved through the time-honored scientific method of repeating and either confirming or contradiciting earlier results. Similarity searches with closely related sequences may also reveal problems even if the exact same gene is not resequenced. Even peer-reviewed papers are often shown to be wrong at some later date. As long as good lines of communication are available for getting feedback into the database about possible discrepancies, I believe that the system will be "self-correcting." I personally think that such an open approach should be welcomed. There is always a certain fear of allowing free reign to competition but, in the end, we always seem to relearn the lesson that this approach can produce good results. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank On-line Service Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net