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
A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment
ending on February 29, 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 Business Working Group.

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
Business Working Group across a wide spectrum of processes from selecting
and editing supplemental material to hosting, referencing, metadata, and
preservation.

Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part
A: Business Policies and Practices is available for download from the NISO
website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/supplemental.. Publishers, authors,
librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators
are all encouraged to review and comment on this draft.

Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
hodgsonca@verizon.net
301-654-2512