[Asis-l] NISO and NFAIS Publish Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials

[Cynthia Hodgson]

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.

"Supplemental materials are appearing with increasing frequency and can no
longer be effectively managed on a case-by-case basis," Todd Carpenter, NISO
Executive Director, stated. "This new Recommended Practice will provide a
consistent approach for publishers to use in handling these materials.
Ensuring discovery, access, and preservation of these materials is in the
interests not only of the authors and publishers, but also of the library
community and end users."

"Electronic media and the Web have changed the nature of journal articles
and what can be delivered along with the article," asserts Bonnie Lawlor,
NFAIS Executive Director. "What hasn't changed is that the journal article
constitutes the scholarly record and today's practices for handling them and
their supporting materials must ensure that the information is available to
future researchers. What is published outside the article as Supplemental
Materials today may well be incorporated into a new type of article
tomorrow."

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. 

 

About NISO

NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate
the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of
information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To
fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information
aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and
scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of
knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across
the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit
association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org.

 

About NFAIS

Founded in 1958, NFAIS is a membership organization of more than 60 of the
world's leading producers of databases and related information services,
information technology, and library services in the sciences, engineering,
social sciences, business, and the arts and humanities. For more information
on NFAIS and its member organizations, contact Jill O'Neill, Director of
Communication and Planning (jilloneill at nfais.org or (215)-893-1561) or visit
the NFAIS web site (www.nfais.org).

 

For More Information, Contact:


Nettie Lagace
NISO
Phone: 301-654-2512
Email : nlagace at niso.org

Jill O'Neill
NFAIS
Phone: 215-893-1561
E-mail: jilloneill at nfais.org

 

 

 

 

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