NISO and NFAIS Publish Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials

From a NISO Announcement:

The 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 been no recognized 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.
“A key aspect of these recommendations is the distinction between what we define as Integral Content, which is content that is essential for the full understanding of the journal article, and what we have designated Additional Content, which provides relevant and useful expansion of the article’s content,” explains Marie McVeigh, Director, JCR and Bibliographic Policy, Thomson Reuters, and co-chair of the Business Working Group. “As this Recommended Practice makes clear,” states 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.”
“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 David Martinsen, Senior Scientist, Digital Publishing Strategy, American Chemical Society, and co-chair of the 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,” affirmed Alexander (‘Sasha’) Schwarzman, Content Technology Architect with OSA – The Optical Society, and co-chair of the Technical Working Group.

Direct to Project Web Page
Direct to Full Text: Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013)
35 pages; PDF.
Read the Complete Announcement (Incl. Comments from Todd Carpenter (NISO) and Bonnie Lawlor (NFAIS)

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