[Taxacom] Publications/Supplementary Material

[David Bettman]

Hi John,

I agree that it is unfortunate when publishers change their websites and
don't have permanent forwarding for their older published URLs.  But the
content is still available online, in this particular case at
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3113.2005.00271.x.
Wiley is actually one of the better publishers in this regard--their
supplemental materials are always open access and available to anyone, even
when the actual article is paywalled.  Most publishers make it clear that
supplementals exist on a paywalled article's page, but they are paywalled
along with the article (Elsevier journals are a common example of this, but
there are many others).  Oxford journals are particularly obnoxious because
the only way to see if one of their paywalled articles has supplemental
material (if you don't have institutional or subscriber access) is to look
at the table of contents for that journal issue; the information isn't
visible on the actual page for the specific article.

In general, searching using Google Scholar is a great way to find the
current URL for an older article that has an obsolete link to its
supplementals.  I've yet to run across a situation when doing that where
the supplementals have been removed by the publisher, they've just been
moved to the new URL.  That said, I have definitely run across instances
where the supplemental link in an article was one hosted by the author's
institution, not the publisher, and those links have subsequently gone dead
as the author has changed jobs, retired, etc.  Sometimes these latter can
still be accessed via the Internet Archive, but often they appear to be
truly gone (or only available by contacting the author directly).

On the broader issue, I am definitely not a fan of the move to shove more
and more content of what is traditionally considered the actual article
(materials and methods, nomenclatural acts, etc.) into the supplementals.
I get why publishers do it--fewer pages to physically print, so they save
on costs and make more profit--but it's a trend I find dismaying, precisely
because there are no archival guarantees for this content.  I do like your
idea of combining the supplementals into the article pdf--and in fact some
publishers do this already, albeit as an alternative download option to
just the article.  The problem, I think, is that supplementals are not
guaranteed to be peer-reviewed, so having the sole article download option
be for a combined pdf is viewed with concern for that reason.  Personally,
I don't buy it--we all download the supplementals anyway, and it certainly
wouldn't be hard to insert a highly visible "warning, text and figures
beyond this point haven't been peer reviewed, they may eat your computer,
cause your hair to fall out, etc." before the supplemental portion of a
combined pdf.  But the other problem is having an immutable online version
of record for electronic nomenclatural acts, and there is currently no
guarantee for supplementals to be immutable once published.  Would it be a
good idea to make them immutable?  I'm less sure about that; I can see pros
and cons both ways.

Cheers,
  David

*David Bettman*
*Curatorial Assistant (Entomology), *The California Academy of Sciences
*Archivist, *The Lepidopterists' Society

55 Music Concourse Drive
San Francisco, CA  94118-4503
(e) dbettman at calacademy.org
(p) 415-379-5360


On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 8:40 AM John Noyes via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

Has anyone else had the same problem as the one spotted by a colleague
> recently? It seems that "Supplementary List" of material examined for a
> revisionary paper published in 2005 has been removed from a publisher's
> website completely. Trying to access the directly from the list from the
> "Supplementary material" section in the revision using the URL provided (
> http://www.blackwellpublishing.com:80/products/journals/suppmat/SEN/SEN271/SEN271sm.htm)
> in the PDF or HTML "Full text" versions of the paper results in an error
> message saying that the Supplementary Material has been removed. There is
> no other link to the list provided. Luckily I downloaded the Supplementary
> Material when it was available and added it to the PDF of the article in
> question, but how often is this type of supplementary information lost for
> good? It may prove to be extremely useful in the future.
>
> Why do publishers not make relevant Supplementary Material  available
> automatically with PDF's of articles in any case. It would not increase
> costs and would make it so much more convenient when downloading PDFs. It
> may also  prevent confusion over whether or not nomenclatural acts are ICZN
> compliant or non-compliant in the future.
>
> Just a thought.
>
> John
>
> John Noyes
> Scientific Associate
> Department of Life Sciences
> Natural History Museum
> Cromwell Road
> South Kensington
> London SW7 5BD
> UK
> jsn at nhm.ac.uk
> Tel.: +44 (0) 207 942 5594
> Fax.: +44 (0) 207 942 5229
>
> Universal Chalcidoidea Database (everything you wanted to know about
> chalcidoids and more):
> https://www.nhm.ac.uk/chalcidoids
>
>
>
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