The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment until September 15, 2012.
Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognised set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators.
The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem - one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Technical Working Group. The Business Group draft recommendations were issued earlier this year. Following the current public comment period, the two parts will be finalised and combined into the final Recommended Practice.
Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations, the supporting documentation, and an online commenting form are available from the NISO website at www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental. Publishers, authors, librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators are all encouraged to review and comment on this draft.
