Despite the understandable need for protecting own data, I find it a little bit doubtful that published data are not the correct data - addition of that watermark mentioned by Frank Oellien. That goes in the wrong direction. That resembles the practice of some people/companies to "not tell everything" in published procedures in patents (and also publications).
In my oppinion, published data need to be true and reliable. Otherwise we will come to the situation where we publish an abstract and a sentence like "Send me a cheque and I will send you the real data." (Exaggerated, I hope.)
Note that this might not even be intentional. Suppose you synthesized Engelanol and reported its synthesis with a melting point of 87.9 degrees. Unfortunately, sometime between your lab and the printing press, a pair of digits get swapped and the published value ends up being 78.9 degrees. Given that the real melting point *isn't* anything close to 78.9 degrees, you (and the publisher, and any court of law for that matter) can be fairly confident that anyone who reports that value took it directly from your paper. Jonathan Brecher CambridgeSoft Corporation jsb2@camsoft.com chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)