Rise of the appendage

Meron Gurkiewicz, Dana Iron, Izhar Bar-Gad, Alon Korngreen

Research output: Contribution to journalComment/debate

Abstract

Scientific publication is adapting, like other facets of everyday life, to the Internet. The rapid rise in online articles has pitted the rigid rules of scientific publication against the extreme flexibility of the Internet. In some cases these two opposing forces act in synergy while in others strange chimeras have emerged. One of these derives from the ability to make supplementary material available online as a complement to manuscripts. This comes in many forms ranging from traditional text, tables and figures, to newer multimedia formats such as soundtracks or movies. Ten years ago hardly any journals had online supplementary material. Since then there has been a steady increase in quantity but more strikingly in the number of online supplementary figures (Figure ​(Figure1).1). The fact that researchers can enhance their manuscripts by providing online information constitutes one of the major differences between a paper bound publication and extended electronic presentations. The addition of video clips or animation to a manuscript enables the presentation of dynamic phenomena and techniques. On the plus side, adding raw data to a manuscript allows other scientists to examine the quality of the data and perhaps apply other analysis methods to the same data set. In areas such as neuroinformatics, attaching links to computer code developed for a specific study can enhance the exchange of information within the scientific community. The highly important methods section, which is currently being suffocated due to space limitations in many journals, can also thrive and allow for better reproducibility of the research when allocated the proper space in the online version of the manuscript.
Original languageEnglish
Article number32
JournalFrontiers in Neuroinformatics
Volume3
Issue numberOCT
DOIs
StatePublished - 8 Oct 2009

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