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Re: [dinosaur] Origolestes, or the blurry limits of nomenclatural availability



I agree. "Supplementary material" is being WAY overused, imho. It's done so 
that printed journals can better compete with PLoS One, PeerJ, etc., and to 
reduce costs by shortening the hardcopy paper. Also maybe so they don't bore 
readers with all the boring details, like the detailed description of a new 
taxon. Hmm.

All too frequently, I'm settled into my lounge chair, reading a new paper (I 
often print them instead of reading on-screen), hot coffee on the table next to 
me, when i come across a text ref. to "Suppl. Fig. S1."  Er, is it important? 
If not, then why is it referred to in the text..? It must be important, yet if 
it is, then why isn't it included in the paper proper??

So I have to get up, go wake up my desktop, find the PDF, click on the "Fig. 
S1" link, and.... it doesn't work! Is it my browser? Is the website down? 
Wasn't the suppl-info uploaded yet? Is it the wrong URL?? So, I go back to 
reading the paper, wondering what important figure I'm missing. And then I come 
to "(see Suppl. Fig. S2)"....

The current publishing model is like a non-swimmer who falls off a boat. 
Something's gotta change real quick. Maybe he learns to swim, or maybe someone 
else jumps in and saves him, or maybe.... he is no more.

Certainly some things are appropriate for suppl-info, e.g. 3D models, very 
large data sets, etc., but that's about it. If it's important to the paper, it 
should be in the paper. If it's not, then fugetaboutit.

    Paul P.




On Friday, December 6, 2019, 4:41:49 PM UTC, Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> 
wrote:

I beg to differ. By relegating the science to the supp. inf., the authors have 
invited all sorts of other mishaps as well as the nomenclatural one. It's well 
known that journals are careless about keeping supplementary information 
around; I would not want to put money on it getting properly stored in all the 
various backup plans people are supposed to use (LOCKSS, etc.). Plus 90% of the 
time it doesn't go through peer review. In short, supplementary info is grey 
literature, of no greater reliability or persistence than, say, an SV-POW! 
post. Letting the body of a work go into that slushpile is a terrible, terrible 
thing to do.

-- Mike.



On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 at 16:35, David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
The science is fine; the "supp. inf." _is_ a proper descriptive paper...