But that wasn’t all.<\/p>\n An extra smack of satisfaction derived from the knowledge that, until that day, papers were things that I read, that I pored over and struggled to absorb. Always they were articles that had been written by other<\/em> people. But here, for the first time, was something created by me. I had found something out and now it was being presented to the world. A once impossible mountain had been climbed.<\/p>\n And I knew that my work had attained a kind of permanence (inasmuch as we may grant our civilisation that destiny). As part of the published scientific literature, the paper was indexed, catalogued and sent to libraries all over the world.<\/p>\n That sense of magic remains, even 19 years later. I still love to get the galley proofs of each new paper – there is a distinct sweetness to the first glimpse of the transformation of a raw manuscript into a peer-reviewed publication.<\/p>\n These days of course, newly published papers almost immediately appear in PubMed<\/a> and are available for download across the planet (subscription or open access permitting). The advent of the Internet has also changed the type of information that can be published. No longer are we restricted to the published page or even to a fixed number of printed pages. These days we can add, affix, annex, append and augment. In a word, we can supplement<\/em>. It is now common for a scientific paper to tow in its wake a great mass of supplementary online information. This provides a rich resource of additional text, images, sounds and video.<\/p>\n Or, at least, it should do.<\/p>\n Usually the added material consists of more text and figures than could be accommodated on the printed page and it’s a boon to be able to include it in the public record. But too often, alas, the magical ‘added value’ of publication is lacking from the presentation of this supplementary information.<\/p>\n What amazes me is that, despite the evident care taken over the paper, no-one seems to have given much thought to the way that the supplementary information is provided to the reader. As a case in point, I was reading a Nature paper<\/a> last week, in preparation for a review I’m writing and needed to track down the associated supplementary information. It was easy enough to find<\/a> but the vision that greeted me on the web-site was a crushing disappointment. There were no fewer than nine<\/em> separate files to download. Nine!<\/p>\n Six of the files were Word documents and three were pdfs. The information was a benign mix of words and figures but for reasons that are lost to me no-one had thought to combine them into a single unit<\/em>. Or to integrate the information to make it more accessible<\/em> \u2014 to put the figure legends with the figures, for example.<\/p>\n I don’t mean to pick on the author (or the journal*) in this case, since my experience is that this fragmentation of supplementary information is fairly commonplace. There is presently a degree of chaos that we could do without; it is degrading the reader’s experience. But I am also worried that the random and proliferating set of filetypes being used to store supplementary information is undermining the permanence of the scientific record.<\/p>\n I think we, authors and publishers, can do a lot better. With just a little supplementary effort.<\/p>\n *Update – <\/strong> As Maxine points out in the comments below, the Nature<\/em> stable of journals have made great strides since 2005 to improve the formattting of supplementary information that they publish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those outside science are often surprised to learn that we usually have to pay for the privilege of being published. The charges incurred by authors, argue the journal publishers, reflect the cost of the significant value that added when a … Continue reading ![\"Graph\"](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2453\/3698435457_b2d4edf246_o.png\")
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\nScience (and history), in the making. From <\/em>Biochemistry<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n![\"SuppInfo\"](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2672\/3699245954_88b6117654_o.png\")
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\nMore or less? You decide.<\/em><\/p>\n