Standards: NISO and NFAIS Issue Draft for Public Comment of Second Part of Recommended Practice on Supplemental Materials for Journal Articles

From an NISO/NFAIS Joint Announcement:

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 recognized 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 finalized and combined into the final Recommended Practice.
“The Technical Recommendations are consistent with the distinction made in Part A between Integral Content, which is essential for the full understanding of the journal article, and Additional Content, which provides relevant and useful expansion of the article’s content,” stated David Martinsen, Senior Scientist, Digital Publishing Strategy, American Chemical Society, and Co-chair of the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Technical Working Group. “Integral Supplemental Materials essential for understanding the article constitute part of the scholarly record and should be preserved at the same level as the article. The recommendations provide guidance to ensure such materials will be available in conjunction with, and as long, as the relevant journal article.”
“Ensuring effective access, use, and long-term preservation of supplemental materials to journal articles requires up-front planning about persistent identifiers, metadata, file formats, and packaging,” explained Alexander (‘Sasha’) Schwarzman, Content Technology Architect with OSA – The Optical Society, and Co-chair of the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Technical Working Group. “These technical recommendations for handling of supplemental materials simplify much of that planning and decision-making, and will also ensure a standardized approach across publishers and publishing platforms.”
“In support of the recommendations, the Working Group has also developed a metadata schema, a tag library, and tagged examples,” said Nettie Lagace, Associate Director for Programs. “This supporting documentation, which is also available for review during the comment period, should be very helpful to implementers of this Recommended Practice.”

See Also: Read Part A of the Recommended Practices (Final Draft)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Journal Articles, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Preservation, Publishing