Publication of biological structures extends beyond traditional scientific literature. Journals act as the publication of record, and exercise peer review on the articles they publish. They provide detailed discussions of individual or related structures, and the relationship between structure and biological function and chemistry. Curated databases, among which the Worldwide Protein Data Bank is paramount in the biological sciences, provide a central repository of structures, including many that do not appear in the literature. The databases provide excellent search and analysis tools. Academic research groups and laboratories can freely access structural data in public biological databases and many develop and share tools, making them also informal value-added publishers. All three sectors are invested in understanding and improving data quality, the completeness of accompanying experimental metadata and informative and interactive visualization. The relationship between databases, journals and a community that actively seeks to improve on previously determined models is complex and dynamic. It is facilitated by the existence of standards for information exchange such as CIF and by the structural biology community's long-established practices of data sharing in the spirit of the FAIR Data Principles that promote cross-domain interoperability.