The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have published a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013). Supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, but until now there has reportedly been no recognised set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery and preservation of these materials.
To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored an initiative to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would address related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project involved two teams working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. This new publication is the combined outcome of the two groups' work.
According to Marie McVeigh, Director, JCR and Bibliographic Policy, Thomson Reuters, and co-chair of the Business Working Group, a key aspect of these recommendations is the distinction between what they define as Integral Content, which is content that is essential for the full understanding of the journal article, and what they had designated Additional Content, which provides relevant and useful expansion of the article's content.
According to Linda Beebe, co-chair of the Business Working Group who recently retired as Senior Director, PsycINFO, American Psychological Association, Integral Content and Additional Content are likely to be treated differently throughout the entire lifecycle of a scientific article.
The Recommended Practice is seen to provide a consistent approach for publishers to use in handling supplemental materials. Ensuring discovery, access and preservation of these materials is said to be in the interests not only of the authors and publishers, but also of the library community and end users.
The Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, a metadata schema, a tag library, and tagged examples are available from the NISO website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental.
More News in this Theme
