Dear all, Irrespective of whether or not one program or the other can extract the information James was looking for I suppose everybody agrees that the suggested methods are fairly awkward and cumbersome. And after all this was not the main question posed by James.
The 'torches and march' you were referring to would probably be to raise a couple of people to sign up a list with which you can approach the journal of your choice in order to change their policy. If that does not work you can try to convince people not to use that journal for publication until they change their minds. In the long term, though, it should not be the journals' task to archive data but a central data base corresponding to the PDB, (I)CSD, http://arxiv.org/, etc. So you would have to sit down with people from the corresponding field and discuss how to set up such a data bank. Once this is established you can still make use of the second paragraph of my email in order to press journals to only accept articles for publications after the data have been submitted at the corresponding data base. Tim On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:12:10AM -0800, James Stroud wrote: > > On Nov 16, 2010, at 10:57 PM, Ethan Merritt wrote: > > Bleah. Virtually none of those are human-readable, no matter what the > > wikipedia page may choose to put as a heading title. > > > > What kind of data are you dealing with? PDF would indeed be an odd format > > for > > diffraction images, but it would be miles better than most of the formats on > > the list you point to. > > > The operative word is "dataset", which is a subset of all things "data". > > A dataset should be in a format that > > 1. can be validated > 2. is structured > 3. is machine readable > > A pdf file guarantees none of the above. It is a presentation format and is > not optimized for validating, structuring, or ensuring the machine > readability of the data that it might contain. > > I'm not advocating for any particular serialization format. So this isn't > about JSON v. XML religion wars. This is JSON or XML versus a file format > that is basically designed to ferry presentation information between printers > or computer screens. > > James > -- -- Tim Gruene Institut fuer anorganische Chemie Tammannstr. 4 D-37077 Goettingen phone: +49 (0)551 39 22149 GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A
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