Special Instructions for Complex Supporting Data

Science strongly encourages authors to format their supporting online material following the guidelines on our main instructions for supporting online material page. In certain cases, however, authors may need to provide a more complex or interactive presentation of data, taking advantage of the hyperlinking and database possibilities of the electronic medium. Commonly, these presentations have tended to take one of two forms:

1. Static presentations. Such presentations might include a static Web page linked to an author-provided collection of data files and/or images, an Excel spreadsheet linked to a collection of data charts, or other, similar presentations not driven by client- or server-side scripting.
2. Dynamic presentations. Such presentations will commonly include dynamic, searchable Web-site-like presentations driven by author-written CGI scripts or other server- or client-side scripting or linked to relational database engines.

Science is committed to playing a constructive role in making available to the scientific community the data underlying articles in the print journal, in cases when such data cannot be accommodated in an established public database such as Genbank or PDB. At present, however, we lack the resources required to evaluate, maintain, post, and debug complex, interactive presentations of the types outlined above. For that reason, in cases where authors wish to make such presentations available to readers, we ask that the authors get in touch with the online editor, Stewart Wills (swills{at}aaas.org), with a description of the proposed data formats, to determine whether they can be accommodated on the Science Web site.

Commonly, in the case of static presentations (item 1, above), authors will be asked to submit a compressed archive of the database presentation that maintains the presentation's directory structure. (For maximum accessibility, it is recommended that a Windows .zip archive be provided, though authors are welcome to also submit zipped or gzipped Unix tarfiles and Macintosh Stuffit archives.) The archive would be posted on the Science Web site, and interested users would be asked to download, save, and expand the archive on their own computers. To be posted, the compressed archive would need to conform to the file-size limitations discussed in our main instructions for supporting online material.

For complex, dynamic databases (item 2, above), authors will commonly be required to sign an agreement to make a copy of the database, as it exists at the time of publication, publicly available on their own Web sites for a period of at least five years after the paper's publication date. The author would also be required to submit to Science a zipped archive of the same Web site on a CD-ROM, with complete instructions for unzipping and installing the database, and to sign a declaration certifying that the copy on the CD-ROM is the same as that on the publicly available Web site.

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