How to deposit your data to the COD
The COD accepts crystal structures published in the peer-reviewed academic press, and also structures submitted as pre-publication depositions or as personal communications. Some details of how we handle depositions can be found in our recent publication (http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/D1/D420.abstract). COD Advisory Board, having consulted with the International Union of Crystallography, has issued a letter inviting all academic publishers to recommend submission of structures published in their journals to the COD: http://www.crystallography.net/archives/2012/doc/COD-letter-to-editors.pdf.
In brief, authors may submit their structures as ?pre-publication data, personal communications, or anyone may submit data that is already published and publicly available. The deposition usually happens via the Web interface at:
or, for short,
While "regular" submissions appear in the World Wide Web immediately upon being accepted to the COD, pre-publication depositions are handled separately – depositors can request a hold period up to one year, with an option to extend it for another 6 months, during which the structure coordinates will not be made public. Only cell constants, brutto composition, substance name and author list will be made available by the COD. Since the coordinate data remain confidential within the COD, we assume that such deposition maintains the originality of the submitted work and the structure paper is eligible of publication as an original research.
After the publication, the structure is made available to the readers of the paper and to all COD users. If publication does not happen, the submitting author has an option to extend the hold period of the structure, make it public as a personal communication, or, as a last resort, to withdraw it from the COD.
All submitted structures receive persistent identifiers – COD numbers – that can be cited in the manuscript, referenced on the Web or in writing. The numbers, of course, do not change when a pre-publication structure is released.
We also highly encourage submission of experimental data (structure factors and powder diffractograms) along with the atomic coordinates of the crystal.
Both the original author or someone else may submit structures to the COD. While we think it is beneficial that the author herself/himself submits the structure to the COD (being the first-hand source and probably the most knowledgeable person about the particular structure), it is possible that published structures are deposited to the COD by other person or organization.