From: Cynthia Hodgson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2013 09:01:49 -0500

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 ([log in to unmask] 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