Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO/NFAIS)
This joint project from NISO and NFAIS (the National Federation of Advanced Information Services) developed a Recommended Practice for publisher inclusion, handling, display, and preservation of supplemental journal article materials. The working groups were active from 2011-2013.
To achieve this goal, three groups were established to undertake the work:
- Stakeholders Interest Group
Stakeholders to be kept apprised of the development of the Recommended Practice. Members serve as a source of feedback on document drafts, and they would provide community vetting of a final document. The group list is open; anyone who would like to track the progress of this project and would like to potentially provide feedback on draft work can sign up by visiting: http://groups.niso.org/lists/suppinfo (N.B. list is no longer active) - Business Working Group
This small group was tasked with drafting recommendations related to the semantic aspects of the topic for inclusion in the Recommended Practice. Questions included: What are the semantic aspects? What are the definitions? What are the recommended roles for the stakeholders in this arena? What are the business practices? - Technical Working Group
This small group looked at the syntactic, structural issues related to supplemental materials in order to develop recommendations around these to be included in the final publication. Members addressed issues such as syntax, linking, interoperability, markup, and metadata.
The Business and Technical working group co-chairs met monthly to ensure that there was shared communication between the groups and their work was coordinated.
This project follows on the recommendation made by attendees at the January 2010 joint NISO/NFAIS meeting on this topic, held at the APA offices in Washington, DC. A copy of the meeting report is available.
Resources
20 May 2012 • Council of Science Editors 2012 Annual Meeting
Supplemental Information: Who’s Doing What and Why, Alexander (‘Sasha’) Schwarzman
20 March 2012 • Earth and Space Science Librarians Meeting
NISO-NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Working Group: An Update on an Industry Initiative, Alexander (‘Sasha’) Schwarzman
29 April 2011 • Council of Science Editors 2011 Annual Meeting
Recommended Practices for Journal Article Supplemental Material, Bonnie Lawlor
2 May 2011 • Council of Science Editors 2011
Supplemental Data: Questions and Considerations, Sasha Schwarzman
2 June 2011 • Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting
Developing Best Practices for Supplemental Materials, Linda Beebe
3 August 2011 • Balisage 2011: The Markup Conference
Supplemental Materials to a Journal Article, Sasha Schwarzman
27 September 2011 • JATS-Con 2011
NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Working Group: A progress report, Sasha Schwarzman
12 October 2011 • American Psychological Association
Supplemental Journal Article Materials and the NISO-NFAIS Working Group Recommendations, Linda Beebe
3 November 2011 • Charleston Library Conference
What To Do About Data: The NISO-NFAIS Working Group Recommendations on Supplemental Materials, Linda Beebe
14 November 2011 • Crossref Workshops
NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Working Group: An Update on an Industry Initiative, Sasha Schwarzman
Working Group Charges
Business Working Group Charge
During the September 27, 2010 conference call, the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Articles Business Working Group agreed on the following working charge for their group. It was agreed that other points may be added as the process continued.
The Business Working Group (BWG) for the NISO-NFAIS Supplemental Materials Recommended Practices Group will address the semantic and policy issues related to delivering materials that are supplemental to scholarly journal articles. These include the following:
- Definition of Supplemental Materials, structurally and functionally
- Definition of related terms, such as datasets, citation, and article
- Recommendations for referencing and linking to and from supplemental material and for providing context
- Consideration of the location(s) of Supplemental Materials
- Recommendations around metadata, persistent identifiers, and citations (do not focus on the DOI as the sole persistent identifier).
- Recommendations for peer review, production, and curation
- Consideration of how permissions might be handled
- Recommended responsibilities for authors, editors, peer reviewers, publishers
- Recommended roles for A&I services, libraries, repositories, and preservation organizations.
- Recommendations for handling corrections (kept as an explicit, stand-alone item. May be folded into “curation” if deemed appropriate at a later date.
The BWG will work collaboratively with the Technical Working Group (TWG) in an iterative process to create a cohesive set of Recommended Practices.
Technical Working Group Charge
The following charge was approved by the technical working group (ballot closed November 2, 2010).
The Technical Working Group (TWG) for the NISO-NFAIS Supplemental Materials Recommended Practices Group will address the technical issues related to materials that are supplemental to scholarly journal articles. These include:
- Recommendations for metadata, persistent identifiers, and granularity of markup needed to support practices recommended by the Business Working Group (BWG)
- Recommendations to support linking mechanisms related to Supplemental Materials
- Recommendations around archiving, preservation, and forward migration of various types of Supplemental Materials
- Recommendations around packaging, exchange, and delivery of Supplemental Materials, taking into account variations in the location and hosting of those materials.
- Recommendations around accessibility practices recommended by the BWG.
The TWG will work collaboratively with the BWG in an iterative process to create a cohesive set of Recommended Practices.
Thought Leader Meeting Report
Supplemental Journal Article Materials Thought Leader Meeting
Date: January 22, 2010
Location: Washington, D.C., American Psychological Association Building
Organizers:
- Linda Beebe, Senior Director, PsycINFO, American Psychological Association (APA)
- Bonnie Lawlor, Executive Director, and Jill O’Neill, Director of Planning and Communication, National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS)
- Todd Carpenter, Managing Director, and Karen A. Wetzel, Standards Program Manager, National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
Meeting Report: Free and available for download
Presentation: Supplemental Journal Article Materials: In Search of Best Practices (CNI Spring 2010)
Podcast: Creating Standards for Supplemental Journal Article Materials (April 14, 2010)
New Work Item Proposal: Supplemental Journal Article Materials (Approved April 16, 2010)
Topic Committee: Content & Collection Management (now known as the Information Creation & Curation Topic Committee)
The results of a November 2009 survey on how publishers handle supporting materials in scientific journals by Alexander (Sasha) Schwarzman of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has generated considerable interest within the information community (Supporting Material, at http://www.agu.org/dtd/Presentations/supporting-material.htm). In recognition of the importance of this topic, on January 22, 2010 the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) cosponsored a roundtable discussion on the need for standardized bibliographic and publishing policies for supplemental material. Additional meeting planning and support was provided by the American Psychological Association (APA), who also hosted the meeting at the APA headquarters. Invited participants represented various journal publishers, scholarly organizations, and libraries. A full list of participants is provided at the end of this report.
This group met to discuss the issue of supplemental materials in journals in order to discover if there might be an opportunity to reach some consensus on how to work with supplemental materials in a more standardized fashion for improved management, access, and discoverability. The report of the meeting summarizes the discussions and provides recommendations for further action.
A report of the meeting is publicly available. As noted in the report, the group suggested that a number of working groups should be created to address the business, policy and technical issues surrounding supplemental materials. The Content and Collection Management Topic Committee has reviewed and approved a new work item proposal created from this report.