The National Information Standards Organization and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services 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. Download it here.

Although supplementary materials, such as images, tables, multimedia and datasets, are increasingly being packaged with online journal articles, there is no recognised set of practices on how they are selected, described, preserved and made available to readers.

Accordingly, NISO and NFAIS have jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices so that authors and publishers know what to do, and abstracting and indexing services know how to handle the material. The guidance should also be useful for librarians and repository administrators.

The Supplemental Materials project has two groups: 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 on issues such as selecting, hosting, referencing, metadata, and preservation.

Comments on the draft are welcome.