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

Hiding stuff in Supp Inf also opens the door to very poor research: as Mike
pointed out, a lot of supplements do not see review (editor's and/or
reviewers' fault), which invites sloppiness and even intentional 'errors'.
I know, I have caught many during review.

There is an obvious correlation:
The longer the supplements, the more likely will I reject a paper due to
grave errors or omissions.
Funny, hu?

If a journal insists on putting methods, descriptions, key tables, etc. in
a supplement, I ALWAYS review the supplement first, by the way.

Heinrich

On Sat, Dec 7, 2019, 01:22 Paul P <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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 these 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 <
> [email protected]> 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 <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> The science is fine; the "supp. inf." _is_ a proper descriptive paper...
>