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
B: Technical Recommendations (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment until
September 15, 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 Technical Working Group; the Business Group draft
recommendations were issued earlier this year. Following the current public
comment period, the two parts will be finalized and combined into the final
Recommended Practice.

"The Technical Recommendations are consistent with the distinction made in
Part A between Integral Content, which is essential for the full
understanding of the journal article, and Additional Content, which provides
relevant and useful expansion of the article's content," stated David
Martinsen, Senior Scientist, Digital Publishing Strategy, American Chemical
Society, and Co-chair of the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article
Materials Technical Working Group. "Integral Supplemental Materials
essential for understanding the article constitute part of the scholarly
record and should be preserved at the same level as the article. The
recommendations provide guidance to ensure such materials will be available
in conjunction with, and as long, as the relevant journal 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 Alexander
('Sasha') Schwarzman, Content Technology Architect with OSA - The Optical
Society, and Co-chair of the NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article
Materials 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."

"In support of the recommendations, the Working Group has also developed a
metadata schema, a tag library, and tagged examples," said Nettie Lagace,
Associate Director for Programs. "This supporting documentation, which is
also available for review during the comment period, should be very helpful
to implementers of this Recommended Practice."

Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part
B: Technical Recommendations, the supporting documentation, and an online
commenting form are available 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
chodgson@niso.org
301-654-2512

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