2012-05-20-CSE-2012_Schwarzman

Supplemental Information:
Who’s Doing What and Why
NISO-NFAIS Supplemental Journal
Article Materials Working Group
Alexander (‘Sasha’) Schwarzman
Co-chair, NISO-NFAIS Working Group on
Journal Article Supplemental Materials
CSE 2012 Annual Meeting
Seattle, WA
20 May 2012

Deluge: sup. mat. ratio
Seattle, WA 20 May 2012 CSE 2012 Annual Meeting 2
Chart courtesy of Ken Beauchamp, American Society for Clinical Investigation

Examples
Supplemental Material for
Male-Male and Male-Female Aggression May Influence Mating Associations
in Wild Octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus)
Christine L. Huffard, Roy L. Caldwell, and Farnis Boneka
Journal of Comparative Psychology, Vol. 124, No. 1, pp. 38–46.
View article
Files:
Huffard_Supplementary_Table_1.doc
Huffard_Abdopus_fight.mpg
This content was submitted by the author as supplemental material for an article published in
APA’s PsycARTICLES. The content is presented as the author submitted it. APA assumes no liability
for errors or omissions and makes no warranties of any kind. APA assumes no responsibility for any
reader’s use of the materials. All questions regarding the supplemental data should be directed to
the corresponding author of the published article.
The reader is expected to respect the intellectual property of the author and the copyright of the
American Psychological Association (APA). The content should not be reused without permission
from the author and APA.

Examples (cont’d)
Supporting Info for: Yu J., et al. (2005), The Genomes of
Oryza sativa: A History of Duplications, PLoS Biol. 3(2), e38.
…
Figure S7. Duplicated Segments in the Beijing indica Assembly.
Plotted in the Manner of Figure 6, and with a Total of 12
Panels
(507 KB ZIP).
Table S1. Raw Data for Beijing indica and Syngenta japonica
Assemblies
Read length is the number of Q20 bases. Clone sizes are specified
in terms of 10th and 90th percentiles.
(16 KB XLS).
…

Examples (cont’d)
Cell, Volume 144, Issue 4, 480-497 18 February 2011
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.01.033
Revisiting the Central Dogma One Molecule at a Time
Supplemental Data for Bustamante et al.
Document S1. Extended Discussion, Two Figures, and
Supplemental References (PDF 534 kb)

What is in the Pandora’s box?
• Multimedia
• Chemical structures, crystallographic structures,
3-D images, gene sequences, protein structures
• Computer programs (algorithms, code, libraries, and
executables)
• Tables, Figures, Text (Experimental procedures,
Extended methodology, Survey results, Derivations,
Extended bibliographies, …)
• Datasets (datasets are not the focus of this group)

Supplemental materials: good idea
Enabling technology makes it possible for:
• authors to present supporting evidence, e.g.,
multimedia, data sets, computer programs;
• researchers to reveal in-depth studies that
would not be available in print;
• readers to replicate experiments and verify
results.

Questions to ponder
• Degree of importance. Are all supplemental materials
equally important? As a busy editor, reviewer, or reader;
which ones must I focus on?
• Discoverability. How do I (librarian, indexer) know the
article has supplemental materials? (Deadbeat parent)
• Identification. How do I know which article is the parent
of orphaned / abandoned supplemental materials?
• Citing and linking. How do I provide a persistent link to
the supplemental materials, and how do I cite them?

Questions to ponder (cont’d)
• Viability and preservation. Will it be possible to
render (read, play, execute, etc.) sup. mat. in 20
years? 200 years? It is likely that sup. mat. will have to
undergo periodic migration. Then, do I look at the
original or the converted object? Are they equivalent?
• Transmission and packaging. When fulfilling an
interlibrary loan request or transmitting sup. mat. to
an archive, how do I package them with the article?
How do I ensure that nothing was lost or corrupted?

Questions to ponder (cont’d)
• Intellectual property rights. Who has rights over
sup. mat., and where are they recorded?
• Curatorial responsibility. Who has custody over sup.
mat.: author, publisher, library, data center,
institutional repository, archive, any other actor?
• Business models. If someone is going to provide
peer review, identification, description, linking,
preservation, and maintenance of sup. mat’s, what
sustainable business models could support the
expense?

Who cares? You should – if you …
… play a role in the scholarly communication process as an:
• Editor / Reviewer / Author / Reader
• Publisher
• Hosting platform / Institutional Repository /
Data center / Individual
• A&I service
• Reference linking and Citation indexing service
• Librarian / Archivist / Historian of scholarship

Researcher community response
One camp:
• More supplemental materials should be made
available!
• Technology will solve most problems!
The other camp:
• Scholarly journal is not a data dump!
• An article is not an FTP site!

Publisher community response
• 2009: Cell imposes limits on the number and
kind of supplemental materials accepted
• 2010: The Journal of Neuroscience bans
supplemental materials altogether; intends to
embed dynamic content in its articles’ PDF
• 2011: The Journal of Experimental Medicine
limits supplemental materials only to
"essential supporting information"

Chronology
• February 2009: NFAIS Best Practices for
publishing journal articles
• November 2009: Schwarzman’s White Paper
on supplemental materials survey results
• January 2010: NISO-NFAIS supplemental
materials Thought Leader Roundtable
• August 2010: NISO-NFAIS Working Group on
journal article supplemental materials

NISO / NFAIS Working Group

Supplemental materials: Pseudo vs. truly
• Print model: article layout implicitly reflected
functional distinction between essential and
nonessential objects (body vs. appendix)
• Mixed electronic-print model: both essential
and nonessential objects are often treated as
“supplemental materials” – yet, some are NOT
• Is the material essential or not? This must be
stated explicitly for machine and human reader

Dimension 1: Importance
• Integral (“pseudo-supplemental”)
Essential for full understanding of work
but treated as if it were supplemental.
Rationale: technical, business, or logistical limitations
• Additional (“truly supplemental”)
Not critical for understanding the work.
Relevant and useful – but still optional
The distinction is conceptual and has
NOTHING TO DO with formats

Dimension 2: Custody
• Publisher
Recommended practices offered
• Institutional repository or Data center
The publisher has no responsibility or authority over
content and does not host it.
No recommended practices offered
• Individual
Not appropriate for hosting supplemental materials

Supplemental materials classification
Importance
Curated by
Integral Additional
Publisher Recommended practices offered
Institutional repository
or Data center
No recommended practices offered
[large data sets]
Individual Not appropriate

• Recommended Practices: scope and general principles
• Definitions: sup. mat., article, data, metadata, etc.
• Curation and life cycle: selection, peer review, editing,
presentation, providing context, referencing, citing,
managing/hosting, discovery, preservation
• Intellectual property rights management
• Roles and responsibilities of authors, editors, reviewers,
publishers, libraries, A&I services, repositories
Business Working Group – policies
Co-chairs: Linda Beebe (APA), Marie McVeigh (Thomson-Reuters ISI)

• Metadata, incl. persistent identifiers
• Preservation, incl. archiving and migration
• Packaging for exchange and delivery
Technical Working Group – “how”
Co-chairs: Dave Martinsen (ACS), Sasha Schwarzman

Recommended business practices
Integral sup. mat’s Additional sup. mat’s
Selecting /
Peer reviewing
At the same level as the
article
May not be reviewed at the
same level
Copyediting At the same level as article.
Should be noted if not
May not be edited at the same
level. If so, should be noted
Referencing
within article
Cite / link at the same level as
table or fig. No ref. list entry:
this content is part of the
article
Provide in-text citation and
link at the appropriate point in
text, rather than at the end
Identifying DOI must be assigned DOI may be assigned
References
within sup. mat.
Integrate references into the
ref. list of the article
(Biophysical Journal)
Keep references separate
from the article ref. list

(cont’d)Integral sup. mat’s Additional sup. mat’s
Preserving Preserve at the same level as
the article
Provide the same level of
metadata markup
Include in migration plans
Take preservation into
consideration when accepting
If uncertain about preservation,
have author submit to a trusted
repository and link to it
Intellectual
property
rights
Treat rights in the same
manner as the rights for the
article
Anyone who has access to the
article should also have access
to Integral sup. mat’s
Determination of rights for
Additional content may differ and
should be transparent to users

(cont’d)
• Identifying / linking and managing sup. mat.
 Sup. mat’s should be linked, bi-directionally, to and
from the article
 Integral and Additional content should not be mixed
 If journal content is hosted by a host / aggregator it
should also deliver supplemental materials
 An author’s website is not an appropriate place for the
sole posting of supplemental materials

(cont’d)
• Discovering supplemental materials
 Consistent placement, naming, and navigation
- on the ToC
- on the landing page
- in the article
- in the supplemental materials
 Consistency across the articles and across journals
 Aid A&I services by including metadata that indicate
the function and format of the sup. mat’s

(cont’d)
• Providing context for sup. materials
Include on a landing page or within the content:
 Article citation and DOI
 Title and/or succinct statement about sup. mat’s
 For multimedia: player, file extension, and size
 List multiple files
 Browser information, if supplemental mat.’ rendition
is browser-dependent
 Sup. mat. DOI or another persistent identifier

Recommended technical practices
• Minimal metadata
 Article DOI
 Supplemental materials DOIs
 Supplemental materials function:
Integral, Additional, or both
 Supplemental material content description
 File formats of supplemental physical objects

Recommended technical practices (cont’d)
 Non-DOI IDs
 Contributors
 Titles
 Languages
 Creation date
 Original or converted
 Subject descriptors
 Alt. descriptions
(accessibility)
 Summary for download
 Content descriptor
 Copyright and licensing
 Preservation level
 Application and platform
- created with
- to be used for rendering
 Additional file information
- file names, file sizes
- mimetype, fixity, validity
• Extended metadata for supplemental
materials

• Preservation
 Publisher must choose its preservation strategy.
WG recommends migration over emulation
 Retention
- Integral objects: original + two latest converted
- Additional objects: original + the latest converted
 File formats
- Publishers uses formal registries, e.g., PRONOM, UDFR
- Publisher defines the formats it will support

• Packaging
 Article and all its components should be
transferable in a single package, e.g., to fulfill
interlibrary loan request, to perform a deposit to
an archive or a repository, etc.
 There are a number of different packaging
specifications available, and this Working Group
does not intend to design a new one nor require
the use of any particular specifications or tools.

• Manifest
- Journal ID (ISSN)
- Article ID (DOI, citation)
- Supplemental materials DOIs
- List of all files contained in the package. For each:
 Function: Integral, Additional, or both
 File name, File size, File description
 Rendering application information
 Detailed copyright information
 Instructions

Sources
Beebe, L. (2010), Supplemental materials for Journal articles: NISO/NFAIS Joint Working Group,
Information Standards Quarterly 22(3), p.33, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3789/isqv22n3.2010.07
Carpenter, T. (2009), Journal article supplementary materials: A Pandora’s box of issues needing
best practices, Against the Grain 21(6), p.84
Marcus, E. (2009), Taming supplemental material, Cell 139(1), p.11,
doi:doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2009.09.021
Maunsell, J. (2010), Announcement regarding supplemental material, The Journal of Neuroscience
30(32): p.10599
NFAIS (2009), Best practices for publishing journal articles, 30 pp.,
http://www.nfais.org/files/file/Best_Practices_Final_Public.pdf
Schwarzman, S. (2010), Supplemental materials survey, Information Standards Quarterly 22(3),
p.23, doi:doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3789/isqv22n3.2010.05
http://www.agu.org/dtd/Presentations/sup-mat/10.3789_isqv22n3.2010.05.pdf
NISO/NFAIS Supplemental journal article materials project
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental
aschwarzman@yahoo.com

2012-05-20-CSE-2012_Schwarzman

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