Access to essential data

Supplemental Material

Supporting material that cannot be included, and which is not essential for inclusion, in the full text of the manuscript, but would nevertheless benefit the reader. It should not be essential to understand the conclusions of the paper, but should contain data that are additional or complementary and directly relevant to the article content.

We encourage authors to include supplementary information with their submissions whenever appropriate; for example, when the amount of material is too great to warrant inclusion in the main body of the paper, or when the material is in a format that cannot be represented in print (i.e. audio, video, three-dimensional representations, and other rich media as well as additional figures and tables). Supplemental material provides additional information that enhances the main text and is directly referenced within the text, but is not critical to its assertions. Please note that atomic co-ordinates used to create molecular models described in a manuscript, unless deposited in a publicly available database, must be made available as Supplementary data.

Although we do not limit the number or type of supplemental material items authors may include, we do require that they provide a relevant and useful expansion of the article, and that they are as well described as are figures and tables included within the body of the article. Good metadata of this material are key to discoverability and usefulness.

For detailed information on formatting and submitting supplementary information, please see our guidelines on Supplemental Material & Data.

Major Datasets

A condition of publication in a OA Text journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols promptly available to others without undue qualifications. Data sets must be made freely available to readers from the date of publication, and must be provided to editors and peer-reviewers at submission, for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript.

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims. Therefore, we require that all major Data sets must be made freely available to readers from the date of publication, and must be provided to editors and peer-reviewers at submission, for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript, unless there are clear reasons to restrict access. Datasets should be archived in an appropriate, subject-specific public archive, or in an institutional repository. The Directory of Open Access Repositoriesprovides a searchable list of over 2,000 OA repositories.

For more information, please see our guidelines on Supplemental Material & Data.