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Dear Billo,
I think the point you miss here is that we no longer exist in a hard
copy print age.
(although many try to cling onto it)
These days it is perfectly possible, and should be the norm,
to publish in open access journals where the main text is as a pdf,
which then links to a data repository containing as much supplemental
data as you need to back up the results,
and allow others to repeat your analysis from the original data.
(which IS and always has been a requirement of publication)
There is no need to fit everything into the main article,
as it can easily be supplemented with online resources
for the detailed processing methods, original image data and all meta
data.
I strongly believe this is the way forward.
The argument that you can't publish the original data in many cases
because the volume of it is too great
is totally bogus. According to accepted, but often not adhered to,
scientific publishing principles,
it is the author's obligation to publish sufficient original data, as
well as the processed/condensed results.
Look at the discipline of X-ray crystallography.
They are WAY ahead of us on this issue.
True, they don't publish original diffraction data (or maybe they do
these days...?)
but they have to publish detailed stats/parameters from the original
diffraction data that describe its quality,
how it was acquired, and exactly how it was processed to get an
electron density map.
Then for structure determination, where they fit an atomic model into
the electron density map,
again all the details are described, then for the final atomic
structure model result,
many stats and parameters are given which describe model quality etc.
They publish very large data sets in the online freely accessible PDB
database,
along with all the experimental parameters and data processing methods.
Biological Imaging should have databases like this,
where all original image and meta data are stored, along with
how processing was done (more meta data).
This is where we should all be right behind the OME project
as it aims to help us achieve the possibility to not only store and
retrieve our own image and meta data,
but in the long run to also publish it according to the principles we
all say we adhere to, but often don't.
cheers
Dan
On Jul 2, 2008, at 6:00 AM, CONFOCAL automatic digest system wrote:
> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 08:22:42 -0400
> From: Bill Oliver <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: An alarming amount of (statistical) image manipulation
>
> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
> Sure. There are lots of problems with the statistics in scientific
> papers in many fields. That's not the point, though. The point is
> that you have limited *space* to present your data in a peer-
> reviewed journal. I recently did a survey on a professional
> practice issue in my primary medical specialty as part of a Master's
> in Public Administration. For the project, I did a full statistical
> analysis of 16 of the 50 hypotheses. The detailed report that I
> turned into my research advisor was 140 pages long.
>
> When I publish the paper, I will have 5-8 pages to fit my results
> in. It doesn't matter whether or not the readers want to see the
> original data and evaluate the statistics on their own. They are
> going to get 5-8 pages of summary results. You simply can't fit 140
> pages of analysis into 6 pages.
>
> The same prinicple applies to imagery.
>
> billo
Dr. Daniel James White BSc. (Hons.) PhD
Senior Microscopist / Image Processing and Analysis
Light Microscopy Facility
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Pfotenhauerstrasse 108
01307 DRESDEN
Germany
New Mobile Number!!!
+49 (0)15114966933 (German Mobile)
+49 (0)351 210 2627 (Work phone at MPI-CBG)
+49 (0)351 210 1078 (Fax MPI-CBG LMF)
http://www.bioimagexd.net
http://www.chalkie.org.uk
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